50 Days of R.E.M. # 19 Pilgrimage

In a fabulous essay on the importance of Murmur to so many people in the UK when it came out, the late and much missed Rock journalist David Cavanagh describes the impact of  this song thus:

'One moment in Pilgrimage seemed to blow the decade wide open. It came in the second chorus when Stipe, (who had sung the first chorus alone) and was joined by a harmony, a high counterpoint and a low counterpoint, all within a second of each other, woven together into a call-and -response pattern both poignant and ecstatic.'

I'm glad that Cavanagh has put it into words for me in a way that I could not. Because I had any one of those moments listening to Murmur in late 1983 and early 1984 and many of them seemed to come together around what was happening in Pilgrimage, the album's second track. It was a call to follow even though it was entirely unclear who to follow or where to  .

Elsewhere in the article Cavanagh nails what made the record so special to so many people when it came out. Because it went so much against the grain of the times in so many ways. Pilgrimage was emblematic of that. 

I listened to it so many times, as with the rest of the record in the first year that I owned it. I heard something different every time I played it. It wormed its way into my DNA. As with the rest of the record I still feel that I owe it and the people that made it a debt that cannot be repaid.