Volume 28, Track 12
Posted on | January 26, 2012 | No Comments
“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1″ by R.E.M. (1992)
When I was in high school I had a t-shirt that had the front cover of Automatic for the People on the front of the shirt and the back cover on the back. I got a lot of mileage out of the shirt; it was a black shirt that had faded to a charcoal gray-ish color. One night during my freshman year at college I went to Taco Bell after class and a guy in his 30′s suddenly blurted out “Great album!” when I walked by. We started talking about the album and about R.E.M. and then he said (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “You know what’s great about Automatic, other than it’s a great album? My newborn and my two year-old fall asleep to it. Doesn’t matter how spazzy or fussy they are—more times than not they just fall asleep after a few songs. This album is a lifesaver.” I asked him if there was a song in particular that seem to do the trick more than others and he said: “Oh ‘New Orleans Instrumental’ for sure.” “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1″ is, as the title makes clear, an instrumental song that was recorded in New Orleans and it is one of the few instrumentals that the band ever made. It might sound strange to use a story about music putting kids to sleep as a segue to talk about a song’s greatness but it seems more than apt. “Instrumental” is a gorgeous little soundscape and a perfect bridge between “Everybody Hurts” and “Sweetness Follows”—two of the album’s darkest songs—and it helps kids fall asleep? That last part trumps everything, really, now that I have a newborn.
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