Trivia / Murmur

• Cut Song: A Cover Version of the Velvet Underground's "There She Goes Again" was recorded during the Murmur sessions with the intent of making it the closing track, and indeed the first cassette release includes it on the tracklist in this spot, but it was cut at the last minute (consequently hoisting album closer duties onto "West of the Fields") due to both a desire to have every track on the album be an original song and to reduce the amount of royalty cuts. The recording was ultimately released as the B-side to the re-recorded "Radio Free Europe", and was later included on both the 1987 rarities compilation Dead Letter Office and the 1992 The I.R.S. Years CD reissue as a bonus track, being indexed in its intended spot just after "West of the Fields" on the latter.
• Executive Meddling:
  • I.R.S. initially stuck R.E.M. with producer Stephen Hague, who constantly strongarmed the band into sounding unrealistically perfect before messing around with one take of "Catapult" to make it sound more commercially-accessible, against the band's wishes. The band eventually managed to defy this trope by cutting ties with Hague and forcing I.R.S. to let them reunite with Mitch Easter, who had previously produced the 1981 version of "Radio Free Europe" and Chronic Town.
  • The album's lead single, "Radio Free Europe", was only given a music video after MTV requested R.E.M. to do so. The second single, "Talk About the Passion", was only released in Europe, and wouldn't get a music video until it was released in the U.S. as the lead (and lone) single from the group's compilation album Eponymous in 1988.
  • Thwarted in one instance: I.R.S. Records, eager to give a few of the songs a more radio-friendly sound, asked the album's producers, Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, to remix "Radio Free Europe" and "Moral Kiosk" to give them more of a "discofied" tinge. When the band found out about this, they ordered Easter and Dixon to remix them again to remove the pop.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Alongside their treatment of Reckoning, the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab remaster of this album has never seen any re-releases since MoFi's initial limited-edition CD release of it in 1995. Both this remaster and the Reckoning one are somewhat divisive among fans because they both featured Mike Mills' bass-playing much higher in the mix than the original I.R.S. masters, but the fact that the band has gone on record stating that this alteration was closer to their original intentions for those albums has led to these specific versions becoming somewhat coveted.
• Rarely Performed Song: The band stopped playing "Catapult" live after 1984 due to their bad memories of attempting to record it with producer Stephen Hague. Hague was an acidic perfectionist during the band's tryout sessions with him, and the Sisyphean process of recording the song deeply demoralized them before they eventually got fed up and convinced I.R.S. Records to replace him with prior collaborators Mitch Easter and Don Dixon. Even after they recorded a satisfactory version of "Catapult" with Easter and Dixon, R.E.M. couldn't perform it on-stage without thinking back to their turbulent first attempts with Hague.
• Shrug of God: In the liner notes to And I Feel Fine... The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982–1987, Michael Stipe admitted that he genuinely has no idea what "Pilgrimage" is supposed to be about.
• Throw It In!: The thumping electronic noise that opens the album's version of "Radio Free Europe" is a mix of Mike Mills playing bass and an errant system hum that producer Mitch Easter decided to incorporate into the song when it was accidentally caught on tape, opening and closing a noise gate in time to Mills' playing.
• Tourist Bump: The album gave an unexpected amount of publicity to the abandoned railway trestle in Georgia depicted on the back cover, to the point where it's become a popular tourist destination despite its dilapidation. So popular is "the Murmur trestle" that the local community continuously pushed hard to preserve it as a landmark until its eventual dismantling in 2022.
• Trope Codifier: The album cemented many of the tropes of American Alternative Rock in the '80s: moody, grainy/gritty artwork with limited use of color and tone, '60s-inspired production, and an explicitly non-commercial stance. Do note the "American" part; with the sole exception of The Smiths, most British alternative acts generally didn't adhere to most of these tropes (at least not all at once), largely due to being separated by an ocean in a pre-internet era.
• Troubled Production: The band's "tryout" sessions for the album with Stephen Hague as a potential producer. During the recording session for "Catapult", Hague reportedly made the band perform an unnecessary amount of takes of the song, while trying to get the band to change their parts and claiming Bill Berry sucked at playing drums, constantly trying to get him to "play better" each time (which demoralized Berry). To make matters worse, once the song was finished, Hague took it to a different studio (Synchro Sound in Boston, home of The Cars) and added synthesizers, which the band were explicitly dead-set against including in any of their songs at the time. This sent the band over the edge, pissing them off to such an extent that they refused to record the album without their prior producer Mitch Easter.

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