Share a song that captures the feeling of being understood.

Automatic for the People was my first R.E.M. record; one of the 12 compact discs I received when, at the tender age of 13, I excitedly pulled a Columbia House mailer from a public library copy of Rolling Stone, taped a single dirty penny to it, and unwittingly entered into what it would later become clear was a pretty shady contract... ahhhh, the innocence of youth in the early Nineties.

This whole record is one that has taken up residence in my soul, somehow simultaneously intimately and inextricably connected to a specific time and place (in my case, The St. Croix River Valley in western Wisconsin, 1993 and 1994), but also utterly timeless. These songs contain depths that my 13/14 year old self couldn't have grasped, depths that continue to reveal themselves to me now, 30 plus years later... and none moreso than Nightswimming. Even as a teenager, this song drew me into a mystery that I felt I only half understood. My friends and I, we were the kids in the photograph. Reckless, bold, full of hormones and promise. The world was beautiful, alive with potential and we didn't know what we didn't know.

But at some point, I entered the club. Maybe your in it too... Here's how you know:

When Michael sings the line "I'm not sure all these people understand...", you weep, because the unsung implication of that line is "...but we do." We understand. All of us drawn into sacred communion by the power of a song. A song that walks with us through the decades and in an act of alchemy makes a beautiful, coherent whole of both our innocence and our experience.

"Every streetlight a reminder."