“Can't Get There From Here” by R.E.M.

"Can't Get There From Here" was the first single R.E.M. pulled from their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, in 1985, and it caught the band in a strange, frisky mood. Joe Boyd produced it, and for the first time on an R.E.M. record there's a horn section, punching in behind the band like a brass band that wandered in from the wrong parade.

Peter Buck's chiming Rickenbacker chords push it along, Mike Mills and Bill Berry lock into a loping, rubbery groove, and Michael Stipe hollers and yelps his way through it, name-checking the little town of Philomath, Georgia, along the way. Writer Matthew Perpetua, looking back over their work in 2010, heard it as an oddball stab at Southern funk, and that's about right: it's gloriously lopsided. All four members share the writing credit.

It only bubbled under the Billboard Hot 100, but it stuck around, turning up in 2006 on And I Feel Fine... The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982–1987. "Driver 8" came next.

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