Haunted by Home: R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction

There’s always been a whisper around this record that it was the moment R.E.M. felt gravity’s pull — that slow descent where faith meets fatigue, and the only way forward is deeper in.

Recorded in a damp London studio far from Athens, with a producer (Joe Boyd) better known for Fairport Convention and Nick Drake than college radio, Fables of the Reconstruction has long been painted as the odd child in the family photo. And yet, like all myths worth retelling, the story’s a little crooked. What they really built here was the most R.E.M. record R.E.M. ever made: half riddle, half sermon, hazy as a swamp at dusk, flickering with light that only gets brighter the longer you sit with it.

“We can reach our destination, but we’re still a ways away.”

Even the title plays games, splitting into two faces depending on which way you look: Fables of the Reconstruction or Reconstruction of the Fables. Not just clever wordplay — a mission statement. Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry were remaking Southern storytelling in their own image, pulling on a tradition as old as the sweetgum trees and as weird as Flannery O’Connor. No accident that somewhere in this swirl of tales and half-told parables you’ll find song names which, stitched together, sound suspiciously like a certain critic who’s bringing home some bacon in these very pages.

By 1985, the influences on R.E.M. were as tangled as the vines choking a Georgia back porch. The Byrds still loomed large in Buck’s jangle (though not for much longer), but so did the spikier edges of Wire and Gang of Four. And floating through it all were Big Star’s ghostly fingerprints — Radio City’s shimmering ache and Third’s fractured beauty, teaching R.E.M. that pop didn’t have to be whole to matter.

Meanwhile, Stipe had moved past the full-mumble era into something closer to Appalachian chant, half-invented folklore spilling out of him, channeled through his spiritual godmother who’d first made that kind of incantation sound holy — Patti Smith. Her Horses-era poetics taught him that abstraction could be revelation, that identity could be performance, and that belief, however ragged, could live inside distortion. Berry and Mills held it all steady, equal parts Stax rhythm section and garage band energy. And under Boyd’s watch, some English folk moss crept into the corners too. You can hear it on “Green Grow the Rushes” or “Good Advices,” like Fairport filtered through kudzu.

In hindsight, Fables wasn’t a new adventure in lo-fi for the band — Chronic Town and Murmur already shimmered with tape-born haze — but it was the first time they made that fog feel intentional. The sound isn’t rough by accident; it’s murky by design, a deliberate embrace of imperfection as atmosphere. What later generations of indie bands would chase with tape hiss and detuned guitars, R.E.M. found by leaning into mood over mastery.

But if Fables is sewn from many cloths, it feels like it only could’ve been born below the Mason-Dixon. The songs sound haunted by porchlight, freight trains, the smell of wet dirt after summer rain. The enduring “Driver 8” is the obvious anchor — jangly enough for radio but already splintered, a railroad hymn about work, weariness, and motion without destination. “Can’t Get There From Here” is a funky detour, Berry kicking hard while Stipe leans into his Southern drawl and colloquialisms, thumbing his nose at geography and destiny alike. And then there’s “Wendell Gee,” the album’s tender closer, a waltz that feels less like a song and more like a farewell whispered from a rocking chair.

Like so much of R.E.M.’s early work, Fables didn’t just absorb influences — it became one. The B-52’s, Pylon, and Love Tractor had already established the Athens scene, but this album’s atmosphere, its strange mix of mystery and melody, bled outward. You can hear it years later in Neutral Milk Hotel and the rest of the Elephant 6 collective that encamped in Athens during the 90s, who took R.E.M.’s murk and cranked the eccentricity.

The Replacements may have worshipped Chilton, but they also envied Stipe’s ability to turn mumble into myth. Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus admitted he studied these records like scripture, cribbing the art of saying both everything and nothing at once. Even Wilco’s more spectral corners — Being There, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — trace some of their DNA to this twilight world.

And the artwork feels like a riddle muttered through the pines. The sepia-toned, woodcut-like portrait looks both antique and half-decayed, like something you’d stumble on in the back of a courthouse in Milledgeville. It doesn’t announce itself; it dares you to lean in, to wonder whether the past is folklore or fact.

That ambiguity mirrors the music inside: half reconstruction, half fable, Southern ghosts pulled into the present and left unresolved. R.E.M. always knew a record’s face could be as cryptic as its sound. Flip it over and the puzzle deepens — antique print, blurred text, more concealment than clarity. It’s a stark turn from Reckoning, where Howard Finster’s carnival of sorts wrapped the band in eccentric mysticism. Finster gave them holy whimsy; Fables trades that for something more haunted, like songs unearthed from Georgia red clay you might find while gardening at night.

If Murmur was their secret language and Reckoning their sharpened craft, then Fables of the Reconstruction is their haunted sermon, the point where they leaned fully into mythmaking. It’s the sound of four young Southerners realizing they could be both preservationists and deconstructionists, stewards of tradition and sly inventors of new folklore. No wonder the title insists on being read both ways.

Line the sleeves in order, and the arc sharpens. Murmur tangled itself in kudzu, so Southern it looked swallowed whole. Reckoning brightened things with Finster’s riot of vision. Fables pulls the shutters closed, prints its mystery in sepia, dares you to squint at the grain. Three albums, three masks: nature, spirit, ghost. The covers echo the songs — less self-portrait than haunted landscape, daring us to decipher.

Dismissed by the band, Fables was embraced by fans and musicians who let it grow in the shadows. Decades on, it feels less detour than foundation. The fables we reconstruct from it are still shaping the songs we sing.

Best time to listen? Dusk in late July on a Garden Hills deck, when the cicadas are loud enough to cover your thoughts, and the past of your life’s rich pageant feels both further away and closer than you want it to be.

Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Maps And Legends.” When I think of R.E.M., this is the exact sound that comes to mind. It’s oaky, muddled and mysterious tone captures the energy of R.E.M. as a band, and could be the centerpiece of this entire album. The Southern roots, too hard to hide, are only slightly buried under the rainy London fog of the studio in which it was born, making it a time capsule of the art and soul of R.E.M. during their journey through the mid-eighties.

The cool thing about having a song like this out in the ether with no backstory is it leaves interpretation open, and an audience that is curious about who the main character is. This was the case with “Maps And Legends” until it was later dedicated to fellow Georgian artist and Baptist minister, Reverend Howard Finster, who said he was tapped on by God to spread gospel through his art.

This breathed new lore into the air. To make sense of the song is to make sense of Finster, and why R.E.M. was intrigued by his work enough to shoot their music video in Finster’s “Paradise Garden”, and have him design the album cover for Reckoning. Because of this, “Maps And Legends” then leads us to its triple entendre — a legend is a guide, a mystical tale about religion or being a medium of art for a higher power, and Finster, a legend himself whose art has made him immortal.

Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Life and How to Live It.” It might be the most revealing track on Fables, though not in any confessional sense. Stipe lifted the title from an eccentric old Athens man of Russian descent who self-published a book by the same name and filled his house with copies, dividing it into two halves he alternated between, as if the book’s rules could shape the life inside it.

That obsession with oddball Southern elders — their homemade mythologies, their stubborn refusal to conform — runs through the whole record. Musically, it’s unusually loose and freewheeling for a band that, in this era, was often wound tighter than the girdle of a preacher’s wife at an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast. Berry’s drums tumble forward, Buck’s guitar tangles and unravels, Mills’ bass darts and climbs with restless melody, and Stipe delivers his most unhinged vocal since the band’s primitive beginnings, voice cracking and soaring with fevered abandon. The result feels less like a performance than a pursuit — a band chasing the sound of obsession, of weirdness, of living entirely by one’s own design.

R.E.M. can be found on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms, and wherever records are sold.  You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM stations The Spectrum, Lithium, 1st Wave, and The Loft. These days, Berry and Buck keep busy with side projects that carry a faint Athens twang, which is the best place to catch a flash of that old electricity since a reunion remains, by their own word, not in the cards.

Here in the ATL, we count ourselves lucky to have The REMakes, a loving, full-hearted tribute to the band’s formative years, from Chronic Town through Monster, who’ve been lighting up local stages since 2009. If you close your eyes during “Radio Free Europe,” you might even believe for a moment that you’re back at the 40 Watt.