R.E.M.’s Dark And Brooding ‘Sweetness’

All this winter, All Things Considered has been asking for winter songs — and the stories they evoke.

One tough winter in Rhode Island, NPR listener and novelist Thomas Mullen experienced financial ruin with his family. The song that got him through it was R.E.M.‘s “Sweetness Follows.”

“It’s a kind of dark and brooding song,” Mullen says in an interview with All Things Considered host Melissa Block. “It has this low, fronting cello and spectral organ. I’m from the Northeast, and there, winter is very cold, and it’s also very dark. Very often, the sun has set by 4 o’clock, so that song particularly reminds me of a Christmas vacation of 1994.