first round game
(8) REM, “Country Feedback”
vs
(9) Liz Phair, “Divorce Song”
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/4/26.
jeremy bennett on rem’s “country feedback”
These clothes don’t fit us right
I was the richest poor kid you’d ever meet. My parents were teenagers when I was born and struggled to make ends meet. We lived in public housing the first time I broke my arm. There was a change jar on the kitchen counter and once a month my mom would empty it out and count out just enough money to order a pizza from Domino’s. My clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from older cousins and uncles. I suppose I got so used to wearing other people’s shirts that when I was in high school it felt natural to do my shopping at the local Goodwill. It didn’t hurt that Kurt Cobain was on the cover of Rolling Stone in an oversized green cardigan.
My dad worked for a vending company repairing cigarette machines and coin-op games in bars. In the summer, he’d take me with him and the afternoon drunks would give me quarters to play Pac-Man. Smoking and drinking didn’t seem too dangerous when you were busy being chased by ghosts. He came home one day with a pinball machine that needed extra repairs—and once he fixed it it stayed and I barely noticed his trips to the bar were becoming increasingly after hours. Eventually, a pool table followed. And then a jukebox. Our basement was becoming my personal arcade.
You come to me with a bone in your hand
My introduction to R.E.M. came from that jukebox. I was 12 years old when I pushed C22 and “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” dropped onto the platter. I wore that 45 out. I even knew most of the lyrics. A year later I got a cassette of Green for Christmas. My dad listened to Little River Band and The Guess Who and The Doobie Brothers. R.E.M were easily the weirdest band on our jukebox. They were also the only band that I can remember that was mine that my dad seemed to like. But by the time Out of Time arrived three years later, we weren’t talking and I wasn’t listening to R.E.M.
1991 was the year grunge broke. As a 16-year-old with an alcoholic father what do I need to say—this was my scene. Michael Stipe and the guys had got me here, but there was no way a song about holding hands was gonna win out over a song that I share a name with about a boy who was having trouble at home and school. Nine out of 10 kids prefer “Jeremy” to “Shiny Happy People.”
There were real breakdowns, but also fake ones. I tried everything to get through. There were times when promises of quitting and rehab were offered. Nothing stuck. We were two people revolving around each other—neither of us existed in the house at the same time. And when we did it was war. It was the end of the world as I knew it and I didn’t feel fine. By the time “Everybody Hurts” came around I was so far removed from R.E.M. that I had no idea how deep their deep cuts were gonna hit 20 years later.
Self hurt, self help, self pain, fuck all
In 2011, my dad finally got sober. The same year R.E.M. called it quits. Unlike R.E.M. (as of this moment) there would be an eventual reunion for the two of us. We had each gone the 12 step route—AA and Alanon. I had learned to withdraw with love. We had never really stopped talking, but there was always a static—a weak signal—a rural cellphone connection. Then one day, the line was clear. The work had worked. We atoned. We forgave. The in-between was often ugly. There were co-dependencies, a divorce, bad friendships, poor choices, and a lot of being chased by ghosts. This time I was aware of the dangers of cigarettes and alcohol.
A decade of repairing our broken machine had passed. My apartment was above a tailor’s shop on the corner of the main street through town. It had been a year since everything shut down and people were starting to appear more frequently in the crosswalk below. My desk faced the west window and I had started staring out of it more frequently than working. An old man in a red hat carried letters to a nearby mailbox almost daily. The patterns of dog walkers, joggers, and grocery getters were becoming more clear. Like a lot of people during that time, I turned to music for solace—sometimes a soundtrack emerged from the burgeoning bustle outside. A Koyaanisqatsi for the Covid age.
My biggest musical discovery during this time were Quivers, a jangle-pop band out of Australia whose album Golden Doubt found regular rotation on my turntable. It was the kind of album that sounded new and exciting, but also oddly familiar. There were elements of The Chills, Teenage Fanclub, and R.E.M. The R.E.M. influence was so pronounced that it was not a surprise to learn that the band had released a full album cover of Out of Time. Maybe it was time to revisit it. Besides, my teenage angst had worn off well and now I’m bored and old.
I need this I need this
First, the Quivers version of Out of Time is worth every minute. The dated “Radio Song” becomes a slowed down two minute intro into a mandolin-free and driving “Losing My Religion.” While “Shiny Happy People” gets the schlocky edges smoothed off through a reduced tempo, removal of most of the lyrics and a blissed out second half of the song that segues nicely into “Belong.” By the time you get to “Country Feedback” you realize you’ve been wrong all this time.
“Country Feedback” is R.E.M.’s greatest song. Full stop. It’s obviously about the ending of a romantic relationship, but the more I returned to it the more I saw the parallels in my own relationship with my father. The loops, the blame, the excuses. It’s all the same. Sometimes we’re out of time—not in the literal sense of seconds elapsing—but that we aren’t in the right place at the right time to receive a message, to understand a song or film. And then sometimes we are literally out of time.
A paper weight, junk garage, winter rain, a honey pot
I got the call on a Saturday. My dad wasn’t the calling type. He had terminal lung cancer. Six months later I was on a plane headed to his funeral. I wore a perfectly fitted suit. There were years when I thought that call might have been different. A drunk driving accident, a heart attack. I wondered how I might have felt. At this moment, I was sad and thankful. Sad that we didn’t get enough of the good times. But there was enough suffering and I was thankful that it was over.
Back at my parents house, I was digging through a garage full of junk. My dad could fix anything so he often kept everything. There were old computer parts, torn apart stereo equipment, and piles of tools. There was a pinball machine he never got around to repairing and boxes of old VHS tapes and CDs. At the bottom of one of the boxes was a copy of R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People. I didn’t know he owned it. There were so many years of barely communicating that when we finally started seriously talking there was too much apologizing. We ran out of time before we could get to the good stuff—the things we shared—the R.E.M.’s. It’s crazy what we could have had.
Jeremy Bennett lives in Colorado. His essay for Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” lost in the first round of the March Fadness 80s Edition tournament by two freakin’ points so please vote for him. He has no published work of note—he’s just a guy who likes to write sometimes.
Chris Daley: Is Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song” the Reason I Never Married?
Somewhere, I read there are two kinds of people in the world: those who most fear being alone and those who most fear being trapped. Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song” made me most afraid of being trapped. It may well be the reason I never married.
When Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair’s 1993 debut studio album that includes “Divorce Song,” came out, I had just moved to Los Angeles from Boston. I grew up in Massachusetts and stayed in Boston for college because I had the kind of mother that used Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World” as a guilt trip. Reddy sang, “When all the others turn their backs and walk away / You can count on me to stay,” and I understood I was the one who was supposed to stay.
My father, on the other hand, had not stayed. Research has found that age six is the sweet spot when fathers feel their children are old enough to survive a divorce. Not coincidentally, I was six when my parents divorced. Since we’re here to talk about sadness, I’ll admit something I’ve possibly never told anyone before telling you all. If asked what my first memory is, which thankfully no one has ever done directly, I would only have one to offer. No womb or crib recollections for me.
My parents, my baby brother, and I lived in a two-story house halfway up a street that started with a gas station and dead-ended up a hill at an apartment complex that was designed for men who were recently displaced by a divorce. This reality was apparent to me even as a child. Maybe I saw solo men in their mid-life crisis cruisers driving past our house too often to think any different. Maybe I noticed the men when my own recently divorced father came over on his new motorcycle and gave me rides up to the complex parking lot because my mother wouldn’t let him drive me off our street.
That the house had two floors is important because this memory takes place on the stairs.
*
Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song” starts with a memory. In media res, we are suddenly intruding on an unhappily married couple’s road trip, and boy, is it brutally unhappy in ways that alternate between the mundane and the profound.
And when I asked for a separate room
It was late at night, and we'd been driving since noon
In terms of a premise, this is a pretty good one. We’ve got some stakes and suspense here already. Is there going to be an argument? A capitulation? A good night’s sleep for the first time in a while? We never find out because we only learn the narrator’s internalization of the road partner’s response that says more about their relationship than the dialogue ever could.
But if I'd known how that would sound to you
I would have stayed in your bed for the rest of my life
Just to prove I was right
That it's harder to be friends than lovers
And you shouldn't try to mix the two
’Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy
Then you know that the problem is you
In my twenties, when Phair laid out that hierarchy—that it’s harder to be friends than lovers—I was shooketh. I spent years pining for friends who didn’t want to be my lover and when Phair sang, “you know that the problem is you,” it fucked me up.
If being friends was harder than being lovers, why could I only do the friend part? It was harder! What was wrong with me that I couldn’t manage the easy part? I was haunted by the idea that one day, one of these friends would give me a shot at lover, I would still be unhappy, and it would be confirmed: I’m the problem, it’s me.
*
Some backstory I learned later: my father asked my mother for a divorce and one of her conditions was “You tell her.” Not let’s sit down with our daughter and tell her that Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to live together anymore but we will always love you and everything is going to be ok. “You tell her.” So one day, after my mother had stormed up the stairs and shut the door to their bedroom, my father summoned me to the stairs.
I sat down one step below where my father was already sitting. This kind of intentional conversation was unusual and I vaguely recall being excited, like maybe someone was going to ask how I felt about something important. Instead, I was told that my father was going to go live somewhere else, but not to worry: we’d see him on Saturdays.
*
To me in 1993, Exile in Guyville was a revelation. I had recently left my first job in LA as a waitress at Danny’s Hollywood Diner on the corner of Sunset and La Brea—what the Los Angeles Times called “a ‘50s dream eatery of neon and glass brick”—to work at a company that dreamed of being an internet retailer before the internet was really a thing. So instead, we were like QVC but without the quality, value, or convenience. The company was essentially a place for a rich guy who had been released from prison for some white-collar crime and his otherwise unemployable son to hang out during the day. The level of abuse hurled at us by the father—sometimes literally in the form of pizzas that would stick to the wall of the conference room—was made up for by perks like in-office chefs who made our lunch every day and invitations to parties at the future governor’s mansion.
I hadn’t had a boyfriend for years and was sure I would never have one again. The extent of my love life during that year involved hooking up with a Greek guy in a Beverly Hills backyard during a work event, and when we returned to the party, the company’s handsome Southern-accented spokesman saw the grass on the back of my dress and said with abject disappointment, “Awwww, Chris.”
I had been a big fan of bands like Van Halen, AC/DC, and Def Leppard in high school and moved on to whatever was popular with my new friends from college and eventually LA—from Nirvana and INXS to Pearl Jam and Prince. In other words, men. Suddenly, here was Liz Phair, not only boldly declaring she was remaking the Stones’ Exile on Main Street but complaining about roommates, getting her heart broken, and talking openly about fucking. Representation matters.
It took me a long time to connect my father’s early abscondment to my complete inability to expect anything even resembling a romantic relationship from men in my twenties. Old story. And while I desperately wanted a boyfriend, I now can see I had very little desire to ever get married. I had witnessed firsthand what happens when you have kids with someone you no longer want anything to do with, and it was not a state I was eager to replicate. But in 1993, I still wanted what everyone else wanted, and then along came “Divorce Song.”
And it's true that I stole your lighter
And it's also true that I lost the map
But when you said that I wasn't worth talking to
I had to take your word on that
I started to increasingly wonder if I could avoid getting divorced if I never got married, and maybe never having a relationship had this secret upside, because here was Liz Phair telling me that if I were to get married, someone might tell me I wasn’t worth talking to.
But I wasn’t that resolved in my twenties. I was incapable of living without a crush on someone, and that someone was usually a friend for whom I would pine or, in the best-case scenario, someone who lived in another country and would visit once a year or so. These “friends” would monopolize my time and then tell me about the woman they had a crush on, who was never me, but I would have never considered confronting them about it. That’s why after the narrator of “Divorce Song” is told she’s not worth talking to, Phair uses the conditional tense to imagine a confrontation that wouldn’t have happened for either of us.
But if you'd known how that would sound to me
You would have taken it back
And boxed it up and buried it in the ground
Boxed it up and buried it in the ground
Boxed it up and buried it in the ground
Burned it up and thrown it away
*
I never married. I’ve never even been engaged. I remember when Sinead O’Connor got married for the fourth time when she was 45 and I thought, maybe that’s a goal. I don’t have to worry about being trapped if I’ve got a quota. But that didn’t happen.
My mother felt trapped with us. She didn’t make a secret of it. And if there’s one thing I’ve always tried to do is learn from mistakes, even other people’s, so here we are.
I recently moved to Paris from LA and I’m living my best life—or at least I will be if winter and fascism ever end. Somehow I got extremely lucky to age in a time when older women are all the rage, and the years I spent unmarried, I spent making lifelong friends, including some of the men who rejected younger me while I listened to “Johnny Sunshine” on repeat. Maybe they had the right idea all along.
*
I remember learning that Phair married Jim Staskauskas two years after Exile in Guyville came out and feeling betrayed. I listened to that album repeatedly, thinking I wasn’t alone. I too wanted all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas, to be mesmerizing, and to get away almost every day with what the girls call, what the girls call, what the girls call, the girls call murder. I too knew I was going to spend my whole life alone, but then suddenly, I was left behind.
I should have known. Something that always bothered me about the “Divorce Song” was the refrain after the narrator’s partner has accused her of “trying to fuck it up.”
But you've never been a waste of my time
It's never been a drag
So take a deep breath and count back from ten
And maybe you'll be alright
Liz! Why are you sucking up to him? But I recognized that desperate coddling. This Liz is more afraid of being alone.
And the license said you had to stick around until I was dead
But if you're tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am
She’s not worth talking to and he’s tired of looking at her face, leaving her already dead, but why not suck up to him one more time?
But you've never been a waste of my time
It's never been a drag
So take a deep breath and count back from ten
And maybe you'll be alright
It’s going to be a long time before anyone’s alright, Liz, but we’ll get there eventually.
Chris Daley has written about books, cults, music, and heartbreak in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light, The Collagist, Alta, Essay Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and other venues. She helps authors share their work with the world at chrisdaley.com.