Fall On Me is a song by REM that was first released on their Life’s Rich Pageant CD in 1986.
As to what the song means, when one takes all the opinions, the songs, and simplifies, one comes through with the beauty of progress–combined with he unexpected tragedy progress brings. There are many parts of this song in the meanspeed categories of both foreboding and victory–and while it is not unusual to hear a foreboding song played as victory in a live situation, as Eric Clapton does with Layla and Sting does with Every Breath You Take and Bruce Springsteen occasionally does with The River. This situation is different, and willl be explored in detail this week. I have a live version set up to compare–also the song by The Zombies called Time of the Season which does the rare thing that this song does, which is to freely float between the categories of victory and hauntedness.
The graphs below that contain more than one line, specifically, the eleven ribbon graphs, are exactly indicative of the results that I crunch for each of the 10 trials I use as a final mean speed on the two dimensional linear and logarithmic graphs at the top of this blog’s entry. There is no trick to them–they are as simple as they look. You can see in 3 dimensions how I calibrate each measure–8 good measurements would yield an accurate line–the added two trials are for precision only.
I read about 19,000 posts on this song–just kidding. I read about 20 articles, and this piece by the fantastic blogging reviewer George Starosin was in my opinion by far the best, most certainly better than “beautiful midtempo moody song? or “classically gorgeous pop. “
George Starosin wrote a clever review on his page http://starling.rinet.ru/music/rem.htm. In regard to the song, this is what George writes:
“…Plus, they brought the hooks back. With Stipe venturing to extend his orifice a quarter inch wider than usual and making more use of his articulation organs than before (so that, for the first time ever, we are introduced to most of the vowel phonemes of the English language on an R.E.M. record), the band’s capacities for catchiness are broadened. Now they can write a song like ‘Fall On Me’, where the General Attraction Effect commences within the verse itself - as Stipe begins with the usual murmur thing and then suddenly starts raising his voice up to the highest note he can reach - and then reaches the apex with the difficult harmonizing on the chorus. Remember me complaining about the lack of choruses on the last record? Well, they’re back. It takes exactly one listen to this song for the ethereal ‘fall on me-e-e-e, fall on me-e-e-e’ line to get stuck in your head. Ethereal, yes, but different: far more grandiose than before, in fact, as grandiose as it can technically get when your technical means are so technically limited. And then you can start thinking whether the ‘buy the sky and sell the sky’ line constitutes an anti-commercialism manifest or not….”
The graphs are based on a spreadsheet generated with this method:
a) Calibration of groups of every common measure (four quarter-notes) ten times with Seiko 300-lap stopwatches;
b) Ten trials were averaged, coordinated and synthesized.
c) Speed graphs were created in Microsoft’s Excel for MacIntosh 2004 on an Apple iBook G4 as hardware printed and scanned on an Epson CX4600.
Best
Ian Schneider,
NY, New York
1 July 2006
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