May God's love be with you

I think I officially landed in the 21st century today by making my first purchase from itunes. What convinced me to take this giant leap? Michael Stipe's cover of 'In the Sun' which he recorded as a charity single for victims of Hurricane's Katrina and Rita with James Iha (of The Smashing Pumpkins) and Chris Martin. I heard it on the radio a week or so back and it blew me out of the water.

I've been thinking about REM a bit recently, I think Stipe was the first singer I ever really connected with and wanted to emulate in some way. I remember just absorbing all of Out of Time and Automatic for the People and making my first faltering attempts to write song lyrics (which are so unredeemably awful they will never see the light of day*) after discovering the band (and so discovering alternative music). More guts and gravitas than anything I'd encountered before at age 13. Even after being over played and plagiarized to death for a decade, I think few singers come anywhere close to the grace and scope of his vocals. Check the song out here.

*The first was a love song to a girl I'd met at a camp (who didn't like me). I had the stupidity to send it to her to 'see what you think of my lyrics' hoping she'd fall in love with me due to my amazing romantic poetry. It didn't work. I'm really ok with that.