“Losing My Religion” — R.E.M.

“Losing My Religion” is so much more than an iconic mandolin-led tune and an award-winning music video…although it’s both of those things too…

A bit like Slash messing around in the studio and ending up with the intro to “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, Peter Buck was experimenting with a recently-acquired mandolin when he stumbled across the riff that underpins “Losing My Religion”.

A title like “Losing My Religion” could easily stir up some controversy. Thank goodness Twitter hadn’t been invented back in the early 1990s or one of R.E.M.’s greatest songs might never have seen the light of day.

But I don’t take the title too literally, myself.

I’ve always taken it to mean something more like losing faith or trust in a set of strongly-held beliefs rather than the more narrow definition of organised religion. Although it could obviously apply to that too.

Instead of “Losing My Religion”, perhaps imagine R.E.M. are singing about “losing my faith and trust in things that really matter in my life, and which I used to believe with every fibre of my being”….although I’ll grant you that title isn’t nearly as snappy as “Losing My Religion”…

You see, we’re at a bit of a crossroads in most Western democracies.

Whole societies have been structured around a fairly widely-held set of values and beliefs which served us at least reasonably well for hundreds of years, but which are proving less true than they used to be.