This Is Not News

I’m here at my PC doing some data entry and iTunes has pulled up “I Wanted to Be Wrong” from R.E.M.’s 2004 album Around the Sun. Now, this is one of the songs from Around the Sun that I like, which is why it’s still in my iTunes library. But there’s probably an interesting commentary on the way the mood of the country has changed over the last four years in the contrast between this quiet, haunted, perplexed song and the mad-as-hell intensity of the tunes from Accelerate. And I find it oddly difficult to pull up the 2004 mood in my own emotional memory.