Electrolite

TEN years to the day since REM announced they were splitting up, it seems fitting that Mike Mills and Michael Stipe are on the line from Athens, Georgia to discuss a song about endings. The elegiac closing track on their 1996 album New Adventures In Hi-Fi, “Electrolite” is suffused with the kind of fin-de-siècle wistfulness which defined earlier REM classics “Perfect Circle” and “Nightswimming”.

Based around a lilting piano motif which Mills composed in his girlfriend’s apartment while “goofing around”, “Electrolite” viewed the coming millennium through the lens of Los Angeles, the quintessential 20th-century city. A happy-sad hymn to the notion of LA as an avatar of surface brilliance and inner emptiness, Stipe’s lyrics reference Mulholland Drive and three shining lights of Hollywood: James Dean, Steve McQueen and Martin Sheen.

“The title of the song references what I’d refer to as the electrolyte blanket, looking out at Los Angeles at night from the hills, or looking down from an airplane,” says the singer. “The idea that, particularly in the American west, if you took a giant, universe-sized steam shovel and just scraped away the surface of the place, all that would be left is earth. Our impact is actually quite shallow. LA represents that very well as a relatively new place, as the last place to be colonised in America, but also as somewhere that represents hope.”