It was my sophomore year of high school, and I’d convinced my parents to let me go with friends to see R.E.M. play the Omni in Atlanta on their Green World Tour. There’s bootleg video footage of that show on YouTube; watching it now, I realize how their 90-minute show set the bar really high for my subsequent expectations for concerts. That Monday I wore the concert tee I’d bought with babysitting money to school; it seemed like everyone there had on an R.E.M. t-shirt. It was the one day of high school that I felt I actually fit in.
After my family moved to Middletown, Ohio, I listened to R.E.M. nearly constantly. The music was good, and smart, and it reminded me not only of these happy memories, but more generally of the place I considered home. The red clay weirdness of Georgia, with place names like Philomath. The speaker in “(Dont Go Back To) Rockville,” trying to convince his beloved to stay — that yearning resonated with me.
That fall in Middletown, as I worked on filling out my cassette collection, I bought their 1985 album Fables Of The Reconstruction. I knew some of the songs already, like “Driver 8” and “Cant Get There from Here,” from my VHS copy of R.E.M. Succumbs, their collection of music videos, and from Eponymous, their 1988 greatest hits collection. But much of the album was new to me: the minor chord melancholy of songs like “Wendell Gee” and “Kohoutek” spoke to me in a way that both reflected my own melancholy and reminded me of the landscapes that I missed.
But there was one song on Fables that was particularly resonant: “Maps And Legends.” On Side One of the cassette just before “Driver 8,” something about the minor-key pop sensibility and enigmatic lyrics connected with me. My sense of isolation at a new school, trapped in a culturally and geographically unfamiliar region, feeling lost amid my disintegrating family structure, I felt seen and validated by the song’s opening lyrics:
He’s not to be reached, he’s to be reached
Called the fool and the company
On his own, where he’d rather be
Where he ought to be
And he sees what you can’t see, can’t you see that?
Sitting in my yellow-wallpapered room, feeling the weight of my calculus homework and the clouds of unhappiness that pervaded the entire house, I felt both sad in my isolation and glad of my solitude. The lyrics seemed to echo that feeling.
When my anxiety-fueled feelings of disconnection would arise, I would listen to the song again and again. The song’s chorus seemed to provide some clues to a way out of my weirdness:
Maybe he’s caught in the legend
Maybe he’s caught in the mood
Maybe these maps and legends
Have been misunderstood
I wasn’t so far gone as to think that Michael Stipe was sending a message directly to me or anything like that. However, the refrain of, “Maybe these maps and legends have been misunderstood” so resonated with my experience of reaching the end of high school, feeling my family falling apart, questioning so very much of what I’d taken for granted for most of my life: Religion. Politics. Values. Friendship. The meaning of “home.”
Certainly such questioning is pretty normal for a sixteen-year-old girl reaching the end of high school and about to leave home for the freedom of a college campus, and this was likely the source of some of my general anxiety and my specific attraction to the song. However, the physiological experience of panic attacks was not normal, and as my family drama amped up over the next couple of years, I appreciated anything that helped assuage the nauseated, vertiginous feelings of anxiety. The song seemed to reassure me that there might be different explanations for and ways of living in the world; I just needed to keep looking for them.
So. In December 2022 — more than thirty years after I first took such comfort in these lyrics — I was living in Georgia again, but this time in Macon, a much easier place to live than the Atlanta suburbs where I grew up. I was a college English professor who had published books and articles (including an article about author Flannery O’Connor’s influence on R.E.M.’s work), and I had discovered that Athens was an easy two-hour drive from where I lived (that didn’t even require driving through Atlanta).
I’d managed to get online and get a ticket to the Chronic Town tribute concert at the 40 Watt Club, an all-star show that sold out quickly. Organized by local musicians, the event raised money for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that support reproductive rights. The night of the show, I stood in line in the rain for 45 minutes before the doors opened, and this dedication allowed me to claim a space close to the stage.
The experience was epic; it’s in the top three or four best concert experiences that I’ve had. In addition to the legendary artists like Lenny Kaye, Mitch Easter, and Vanessa Briscoe Hay who performed, both Peter Buck and Mike Mills of R.E.M. joined in on several songs during the nearly three-hour show. Standing close enough to see Peter Buck’s hands play “Fall on Me” on his Rickenbacker was mind-blowing, especially since I’d been learning to play the guitar long enough that I could make some sense of what he was doing. Singing along with Mike Mills to the chorus of “Superman” was joyous.
And in the middle of it all, they played “Maps And Legends.” I don’t listen to it that often anymore, as there are other R.E.M. songs that I enjoy more: their country-inflected songs like “(Dont Go Back To) Rockville” and “Driver 8” or their more rock and roll songs like “Harborcoat” and “Radio Free Europe.” And yet, when the Baseball Project — including both Peter Buck and Mike Mills — sounded those first few notes of “Maps And Legends,” I felt them deeply. In the midst of a joyous crowd at the fabled 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, hearing, “He’s not to be reached; he is to be reached” performed live — while standing perhaps ten feet from Mike Mills on the stage — had tears streaming down my face.
I was a 48-year-old woman with a Ph.D. who’d driven myself from my happy home in Macon where my husband was studying for his MLIS degree. I’d checked myself into a good hotel room and had dinner with a dear friend earlier that night. I was in a mythic dive bar that I’d been reading about for decades, dancing to music performed by musicians that I’d been admiring for decades, as well. As that song took me back thirty years to the anxiety and uncertainty of my Midwestern bedroom, I felt myself sending back a hopeful lifeline to my sad, teenage self. ”Hey, hang in there!” I shouted back along this tether in time. “It’s going to suck for a while, but you will get past it all. One day, you’ll be here, and this song will mean even more!”
I kept dancing and crying and experiencing the most wonderful catharsis throughout that song, feeling safe among hundreds of other music fans whom I am sure were experiencing their own travels through time. There are so many reasons why music plays such an important role in my life beyond being a balm and a catharsis — it’s a source of joy, curiosity, history, and even creativity, as I’m now learning to play instruments myself. However, its ability to comfort and to connect me to my past continues to be something that I am incredibly grateful for — particularly to R.E.M., who is responsible for so much of this comfort and joy.
Postscript: Monica’s story was originally published in 2024 on Substack in longer form.
MONICA CAROL MILLER is an educator and writer living in Macon, Georgia.
SOME OF MONICA’S WORK:
https://substack.com/@monicacmiller
Dear Regina: Flannery O’Connor’s Letters from Iowa
Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion
The t-shirt from Monica’s story
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