a Fragment on REM’s “Driver 8”

I was in the car yesterday motoring down Route 28 with a CD of Fables of the Reconstruction in the deck, and “Driver 8” came on. It’s always tricky quoting a song lyric and pondering what it “means”—I wrote an earlier newsletter about this subject, thinking about a David Berman song—and that’s doubly true for REM, especially their earlier work. Despite listening to their music for decades, I’m often unable to hear or make out what exactly what Michael Stipe is singing, forget knowing what the songs are “about” (which, incidentally, hasn’t diminished my enjoyment in the slightest).

Anyway, there’s a line in the song that goes “I saw a treehouse out on the outskirts of the farm/The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged,” if the online lyrics sites are correct. It’s a couplet that lights up something inside of me. It makes me think of being a child, like 7 or 8, say, and how a yard or a street or a neighborhood or a field is your entire world. Since this area is all you know and it’s so small, you inevitably become an expert on what’s there. An animal bone found under a tree or a burn scar from fireworks ignited on the sidewalk can become objects of fascination. You are learning how to notice things.

Quite a few early REM songs contain shards of detail like this, which makes their albums feel like worlds to inhabit, places both strange and familiar, like a surrounding neighborhood. Another line from another song by another band on another fantastic Joe Boyd-produced album from 1985—written and sung by Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs, a good friend of Stipe’s around this time—has a similar effect on me: “Steep is the water tower/Painted off-blue to match the sky.” I hear her sing it and I can see it.

I took the photo above a while ago, it’s just a random power line pole on the side of Route 28. But the fact that the pole and transformer are surrounded by this wooden platform starts me dreaming in a very early REM/early 10k Maniacs kinda way. Had I grown up in the house you see in the background, this platform probably would have become a theater for adventure, a place to set up army men and hide stuff while bells from the railroad crossing a hundred yards away were ringing.