R.E.M. – Sitting Still

The Song They Gave Away For Publishing Rights

One of the first songs R.E.M. ever wrote became the B-side to their debut single on July 8, 1981. Written in late 1980 alongside their breakthrough track and another early composition, the song started its life in a converted garage studio owned by producer Mitch Easter’s parents. When Atlanta law student Jonny Hibbert heard their demo tape and offered to release their first single on his tiny Hib-Tone label, the band agreed to his unusual terms: he’d press the record, but he’d own the publishing rights to both songs. They were desperate enough to say yes.

The original 1981 pressing sold just 1,000 copies initially, with 600 going to promotional use. The single became a college radio sensation anyway, and Hib-Tone pressed another 6,000 copies to meet demand. By 1983, when R.E.M. signed to I.R.S. Records for their debut album, the band had to negotiate to buy back those publishing rights just to include their own songs on the record. Unlike the A-side which got completely re-recorded, this B-side made it onto the album using the same 1981 recording from Easter’s Drive-In Studio, though slowed down and with Mike Mills re-recording his bass part and some out-of-tune backing vocals fixed.

The inspiration came from an unexpected place. Michael Stipe’s sister worked teaching deaf children, and the song’s clearest lines capture that world of communication barriers. While most of the track dissolves into what Stipe himself later called “an embarrassing collection of vowels,” two phrases ring out with total clarity: the insistent repetition of “I can hear you” and the final haunting question, “Can you hear me?” Everything else is deliberately murky. Stipe admitted in a 1991 interview that the chorus line about Katie barring the door is a Southern expression warning children about impending punishment, but he also confessed the phrase means essentially nothing in the song. He’s acknowledged he just strings together nonsensical vowels and approximates the words when performing it live.

Producer Mitch Easter and his partner Don Dixon recorded the album version at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, in January 1983. The band had already been performing most of the material for a year or two, so the songs felt lived-in and road-tested. Easter later said his favorite version would be an imaginary hybrid with the tempo of the 1981 original and the sonics of the album cut. Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker guitar arpeggios respond to Stipe’s vocal lines in call-and-response fashion, while Mills and drummer Bill Berry create one of the few straightforward rhythm sections in early R.E.M., propelling the song forward with punk-influenced eighth notes instead of Mills’ typical walking bass lines.

The album it appeared on beat Michael Jackson’s blockbuster, a certain massive Police record, and a breakthrough Irish band to become Rolling Stone’s number one album of 1983. Despite that acclaim and reaching number 36 on the Billboard album chart, the record only sold about 200,000 copies by year’s end. I.R.S. Records executives were mind-boggled by the positive reviews, especially from British press, considering the band hadn’t even toured there yet. Music journalist Andrew Earles later called it required listening for any fan of American underground rock.

The track’s legacy as perhaps Michael Stipe’s most famous example of indecipherable pronunciation has endured for decades. When Rolling Stone asked him in the early nineties if the song contained the line about city traffic and the big hill, he simply said no, there’s no hill in it, then refused to clarify what he was actually singing. Producer Mitch Easter kept the studio patter from those sessions and has tapes with unreleased songs from that era, mysterious recordings he says he could never throw away. In 2021, when R.E.M. reissued the original 1981 single for the first time in 40 years, the band admitted they still preferred the faster original version over the one that appeared on the album.

What makes this song matter isn’t its chart performance or its clarity. It’s the perfect distillation of early R.E.M.’s aesthetic: urgent, mysterious, emotionally resonant despite being literally incomprehensible. Those two crystal-clear lines about hearing cut through all the vocal fog to ask the only question that really matters in any relationship. Can you hear me? Forty years later, we’re still trying to answer.