Back to where I started. Reviewing the record this comes from was the first thing I did on here. It's always the album I go back to because it's the first I truly felt I owned and it's really the source of where all the love for all kinds of things has flowed from ever since.
West of the Fields alludes to the Ancient Greek concept of the Fields of Elysium, where we're supposed to go to when we're done if we're fortunate. It's imagery that has a very direct connection with the American South through literature and art. Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire is set in the New Orleans suburb of Elysian Fields. R.E.M. take it further and reconstruct their own version of Elysium in the South. They were from Athens, Georgia after all. The lyrics and meaning aren't clear as they rarely are in the band's early records but it's all dream, memory and slipping painlessly into sleep and what happens to us while we're there. Like I said in my first review the song fairly gallops home.
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