Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
In R.E.M.’s early years, Michael Stipe was comfortable with ambiguity, as a lyricist and as a public figure. His lyrics were dense and cryptic, but they wouldn’t be printed out in the band’s liner notes, and his vocals would sometimes be buried in the mix. He declined to lip sync in the band’s music videos, and sometimes he’d hide behind his hair onstage, mumbling the words that fascinated his fans. “Seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean / Seven thousand years to sleep away the pain,” he sang on the standout second track from 1984’s Reckoning, an apparent reference to a parable about greed in Claire Huchet Bishop’s children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers.
Stipe’s sexual ambiguity was also a subject of interest to the public, and he didn’t begin to openly address his bisexuality in interviews or lyrics until the mid-’90s. In Michael Azerrad’s 2008 SPIN cover story on R.E.M., Stipe eventually revealed an unknown autobiographical element of that particular mysterious lyric. “There are songs I wrote in the past that were gender-specific. ‘7 Chinese Bros.’ was about me breaking up a couple – and then dating both of them, a man and a woman, which is a terrible thing to do, but I was young and stupid. ‘So. Central Rain’ was about the same relationship.”
R.E.M. had stopped performing “7 Chinese Bros.” well before the end of the ’80s. It returned to the band’s setlists in 2005, though, and remained a staple through their final shows in 2008.
Stipe initially had trouble getting a confident vocal take for “7 Chinese Bros.” during the Reckoning sessions. Producer Don Dixon handed him an album by the gospel group the Revelaires, and Stipe loosened up by reading the LP’s liner notes over the band’s performance in the song’s vocal melody. The resulting oddity, “Voice of Harold,” was released on the B side of the “So. Central Rain” single, and later the band’s 1987 rarities compilation Dead Letter Office.
Three more essential R.E.M. deep cuts:
“Feeling Gravitys Pull”
Peter Buck expanded from his signature jangly guitar sound with the jagged post-punk harmonics on “Feeling Gravitys Pull,” the striking opening track from 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction.
“You Are the Everything”
Buck first started experimenting with mandolin on 1988’s Green, resulting in gorgeous album tracks like “You Are the Everything” and “Harborcoat” a few years before the mandolin took center stage on the band’s biggest hit, 1991’s “Losing My Religion.”
“Sweetness Follows”
Half of the band considered this Automatic for the People track to be R.E.M.’s pinnacle, at least at one point in time. “This is me and Peter’s favorite song,” Stipe said while introducing “Sweetness Follows” at the Glastonbury festival in 1999.
