Trivia / Reckoning

• Absurdly Short Production Time: The shift to a more live-friendly sound resulted in the album taking far less time than the band's other releases to complete. Peter Buck claimed that the album took just 11 days to record, which producer Mitch Easter disputed; R.E.M. biographer Tony Fletcher quoted him saying "When I read '11 days' I thought, what the fuck! It was 20 days, which was still short, but it's not 11." Reportedly, the rapid production was also influenced by a desire to avoid Executive Meddling; they wanted to have the album recorded and mastered before I.R.S. Records came to visit. Once the company did, the band just presented them the completed album, and according to Peter Buck, the company "really didn't have anything to say about it".
• Based on a Dream: According to Peter Buck, the title for "Pretty Persuasion" came from a dream that Michael Stipe had in which the latter was directing a photoshoot for the cover of The Rolling Stones' last single, which was called "Pretty Persuasion".
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Ingrid Schorr, the inspiration for "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville", wrote an amusing article in 2000 about being a "footnote in rock history", noting that she was never interviewed for the various books about the band, which just ended up copying the info about her from each other, along with unverified gossip, to the point that she felt like she was reading about a fictional character named Ingrid Schorr rather than herself in those books.
  Ingrid Schorr: I read that as a new girl on the scene that spring I was having "quite an effect on all the boys in town." That's fantastic! As well as news to me. Where were all those boys back then?
• Creator Breakdown: Much of the album's somber mood was influenced by lingering grief from the death of Carol Levy, Michael Stipe's girlfriend and the band's photographer, in a car accident during the supporting tour for Murmur.
• Denial of Digital Distribution: Though it was included in full on the video collections Succumbs and When the Light Is Mine, Left of Reckoning was never given an official digital release — be it in full or split into segments — for unknown reasons. In lieu of this, R.E.M.'s own Twitter account gave their blessing to a series of fan reuploads on YouTube by utahwrx (some of which are now deleted), indicating that whatever's preventing the film from being officially released online is out of their control.
• Executive Meddling: Michael Stipe originally intended to title the album File Under Water in reference to its copious use of aquatic imagery, and indeed the title is still on the LP spine. However, the higher-up at I.R.S. Records vetoed the idea and used the other title listed on the sleeve, Reckoning.
• Refitted for Sequel: "Pretty Persuasion" and "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" were written shortly after the band's formation in 1980, but were left off of any of their releases for a short while; they would eventually be repurposed for this album.
• Working Title: In addition to File Under Water, an I.R.S. Records press release lists Second Guess as a tentative name for the album (which would've effectively made this R.E.M.'s first album with a Title Track, a whole two decades before Around the Sun).

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