A mandolin practised in front of the television
The mandolin does not announce a folk song. It ticks, bright and a little nervous, and Michael Stipe answers as if he had been caught thinking aloud. Losing My Religion, the single that carried Out of Time in 1991, is an obsession dressed as a confession. The phrase, in the American South, does not mean a crisis of faith. It means you are at the end of your rope. Stipe sings it that way, jealous, circling, unable to put the feeling down. The arrangement is all exposure. There is nowhere for the voice to hide.
Peter Buck had bought a mandolin and was teaching himself in front of a television, a tape running, baseball or nothing much on the screen. The next day most of the cassette was a man learning an instrument. In the middle sat the progression that became the song. He has said he would not have found those chords on a guitar. The band took it into sessions with Scott Litt for Out of Time, between Bearsville in Woodstock and rooms closer to home in Georgia. Stipe was wary of a vocal that naked. Mills and Berry held the rhythm without swagger. Strings arrived later, a courtesy the mandolin did not strictly need. The single came out in February 1991, before an album the group would not even tour.
Tarsem Singh’s video made the unease pictorial: Stipe dancing in a bare room, tableaux borrowed from Caravaggio, a story that never quite agrees to be told. It won the MTV hour and fixed the song in a decade that was supposed to be louder. America sent it to number four, the biggest hit they would have. Britain was cooler, which suited a track that whispers its crisis. On the few stages where they played it, the mandolin still led, a small instrument asking a large crowd to lean in. The lyric never names the person. That omission is the point. Obsession talks about itself.
When I listened back to it the next day, there was a bunch of stuff that was really just me learning how to play mandolin, and then there’s what became Losing My Religion.
(Peter Buck, on the mandolin tape)
The success worried them in the way success worries people who had built a career on not explaining. Buck was blunt about anyone who changed their mind because of one song. The record did not become a creed. It became a room people recognised: the hour when you have said too much, or not enough, and the night will not give the sentence back. Out of Time sold in numbers their earlier albums had not dreamed of. This track is the reason, and it still sounds embarrassed about the fact.
What remains is that bright ticking and a voice that will not perform confidence. Losing My Religion is not about God, except in the way any loss of temper can feel like a loss of shelter. The television was on. The tape was running. A beginner’s hands found a song the radio could not refuse. Some hits are built. This one was overheard.
