“Over the years a certain misapp-rehension about Fables Of The Reconstruction has built up,” Peter Buck writes in his sleeve notes for the two-CD anniversary edition of REM’s third album. “For some reason,” he continues, “people have the impression that the members of REM don’t like the record. Nothing,” he hastens to add, “could be further from the truth.” This might well be the case and the album may indeed be the personal favourite Buck now claims it to be. Voice Of Ar Rahman Mp3 Songs In Tamil. It nevertheless still occupies a curious place in REM’s storied history, forever overshadowed by the two landmark albums that preceded it and many of the records that followed, that great run of albums that climaxed with Automatic For The People in 1992. Jackie Chan Adventure Game For Pc. A certain dismay, it seems to me, has always somehow been attached to Fables Of The Reconstruction, a feeling that something different had been tried and not quite pulled off, a view encouraged, despite Buck’s surely disingenuous bafflement, by the band’s own subsequently dour opinion of it. Of all their records, it’s sometimes seemed, this is the one they’d like to keep in the attic, like a troubled relative given to dribbling and public masturbation. It’s perhaps as much as anything else the apparently unhappy circumstances of its making that shaped the group’s somewhat jaundiced view of it.

Michael Stipe’s first choice as producer was Van Dyke Parks, he told me when I spent four days with REM in Athens just before Fables’ release in June 1985. The year before, Parks had released Jump, an album based on the Uncle Remus folk tales popular in the post-Reconstruction Southern American states. Stipe thought Parks would be therefore sympathetic to the new songs he’d been writing, most of which were emerging as evocative vignettes drawing on the story-telling traditions of the Deep South, a palpable air about them of rural fable. He’d been listening, he told me, to a lot of Appalachian folk songs, field recordings, become fascinated by the oral tradition of legends being passed down from generation to generation. This notion would form the conceptual hub of the record REM would eventually record. But in the meantime, they passed on Parks. Elliot Mazer, who’d produced Neil Young’s Harvest, was briefly considered, as was Hugh Padgham, best known for his work with Phil Collins, The Police and Genesis.