my night is colored headache gray

on 25 years of R.E.M.'s Up and college memories

Earlier this week, R.E.M. announced the long-awaited 25th anniversary reissue of their 1998 LP Up. Known as the band’s first album without drummer Bill Berry, the full-length is one of the group’s most polarizing releases; I tend to fall on the side of “underrated classic,” as songs like “Airportman” and the superior “Walk Unafraid” rank among my favorite R.E.M. songs.

Note: I wrote a lot of words about R.E.M. earlier this year that will (hopefully) see the light of day at some point soon, so my deep analysis is reserved for that project for now.

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While I love Up, I associate the album strongly, painfully with my first year of college. I went to a school 650 miles from home where I knew absolutely nobody. In hindsight, that was a pretty brave thing for a shy, introspective kid to do. But the year was a rough adjustment for me socially and academically—humbling, you’d certainly say.

In my first semester, I barely passed multivariable calculus (well, I received a B-minus, on what was no doubt a generous curve, as I believe I failed the final), which botched any thoughts I had of majoring in something STEM-related. I gained somewhere around the Freshman 20 and, later in the year, was absolutely heartbroken when the guy I had a crush on didn’t like me back. (These two things were unrelated.) Along the way, I burned out so hard from exposure to Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing and Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” I still can’t really listen to them today.

On the bright side, I took a class all about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes—oh, if only I could take that again 25 years later, with all we know now!—and one on the history of science that taught me how to think critically. I learned to enjoy vodka from sneak-drinking screwdrivers and Sex on the Beach cocktails in the dorm while having Europop dance parties. I also wrote a few articles for the school paper, which gave me the clips I needed to apply successfully for an internship at Alternative Press…which is one reason I’m here today.

And I often remember staying up until 3 and 4 a.m. just because I could. Growing up, I was always a night owl, and living away from home meant there was nobody there to tell me to go to bed. In hindsight, it was an absolutely terrible idea to wreck my circadian rhythms—but I was 19, what did I know or care?

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Enter “Daysleeper,” the first single from R.E.M.’s Up, which has lyrics that actually mention circadian rhythms.

Everywhere is calm
Hong Kong is present, Taipei awakes
All talk of circadian rhythm

I certainly identified with the narrator of this song, who stays up all night working and crawls into bed in the morning, the noise from a sleep machine lulling them into oblivion. The music was also utterly dreamy—a mix of shimmer and drone, if slightly fuzzy and out of focus—with Michael Stipe’s keening vocals high in the mix.

Where “Daysleeper” shines is in the details—mainly angelic, wee-ooh backing harmonies and a tranquil bridge humming with seashore-like noises. The song just felt drowsy—not in a bad way, but in the way you feel drowsy when it’s way past your bedtime.

In general, I love “Daysleeper” because it so acutely captures that gorgeous liminal space in the middle of the night—the time where everything is quiet and you’re delirious from lack of sleep (“My night is colored headache gray”) and too much coffee, but feel like a bundle of raw nerves:

I cried the other night
I can't even say why
Fluorescent flat caffeine lights
It's furious balancing
I am the screen, the blinding light
I'm the screen, I work at night

Sure, you’re in an upside-down time zone—alone and overly emotional as other parts of the world start to wake up and join you—in a space illuminated by sickly artificial light. But in the end, there’s something really comforting about that middle-of-the-night isolation—the secret, shared loneliness of the night owl ends up being beautiful.

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In college, I had a gigantic late-’90s Macintosh desktop computer and I still remember downloading an MP3 of “Daysleeper” on the college’s high-speed internet—a novel luxury at the time! I also bought Up in fall 1998, I believe at a midnight sale in the Tower Records in Harvard Square—a store tucked away almost out of sight from the hustle and bustle of the square’s main drag.

By my recollection, this Tower location was already on a downslide, perhaps because there was so much competition both in Harvard Square and Boston itself. (This circa-1997 used record store guide gives you a small idea of the choices available.) But the idea I could buy a new R.E.M. record as the clock turned midnight was irresistible. It felt like I was getting away with something.

I also frequented a Harvard Square record store called In Your Ear, which was located beneath what I never realized was one of Harvard’s exclusionary, all-male finals clubs. (Talk about a juxtaposition between the cool and…not.) To get to In Your Ear, you’d head down an uneven concrete staircase, past sheafs of flyers, and into a store crammed full of CDs, vinyl and magazines…in no particular order. It was a treasure hunter’s paradise; among other things, I remember buying a whole bunch of vintage ’80s badges there.

But my go-to store was the Newbury Comics in the Garage, a hodgepodge building in Harvard Square that had a tattoo parlor as well as restaurants and stores that sold jewelry, clothes and other ephemera. To a sheltered suburban kid, this building felt like ultimate bohemia. The first time I visited Boston, I made a beeline to Newbury Comics, where I felt so cosmopolitan because I bought a Radiohead EP and the Verve’s Urban Hymns (how very 1997 of me). During that lonely first year of college, I’d retreat here, raiding the cheap bins for David Bowie CD reissues and or grabbing Lilith Fair-core masterpieces: Dar Williams’ End of the Summer—with the stunning “What Do You Hear In These Sounds,” an anthem for the quirky girls—or Jonatha Brooke’s equally moving 10 Cent Wings.

I always felt pretty lonely living in Boston, so walking around the city going record store-hopping in all the various neighborhoods brought me solace. There was Newbury Street, with its basement used stores and flagship Newbury Comics; Downtown Crossing and its gigantic multi-level Strawberries, as well as scattered used stores that always had deals; and Central Square with its dusty, more outre used stores. Going crate-digging (or racks-digging, as it was the CD era) made me forget I felt awkward and unmoored in my day-to-day existence. The thrill of discovery gave me a lift.

Perhaps the record store that loomed largest was the Tower Records (and, later, Virgin Megastore) on the corner of the busy Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street intersection. This multi-floor location brimmed with vibrant life. It was open late, which is somewhat mind-blowing to consider these days. And there were always people around, so when I was coming home from shows at night by myself, I would disembark at the subway stop there and either hang out in the store or wait outside for my bus. The brightly lit record store didn’t just sell so many things I loved; I always intuitively figured the store would keep me safe.

Turns out, it always did—I always made it home.