“Shiny happy people” by R.E.M. & Kate Pierson

"Shiny Happy People" was the second single off Out of Time, R.E.M.'s seventh album, from 1991, and it finds the band at their most defiantly sunny. Scott Litt produced and Michael Stipe wrote the words. Kate Pierson of the B-52s sings on it as a guest and shows up in the video too, which Katherine Dieckmann directed with the 1948 film Letter From an Unknown Woman as her inspiration.

It gave R.E.M. a rare double: number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number six in Britain, their first UK top 10 and the only song of theirs to make the top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the last of their four American top-10 singles, and in Ireland, where it reached number two, nothing of theirs has done better. The band played it with Pierson on Saturday Night Live in April 1991.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.