“Drive” by R.E.M.

"Drive" opens Automatic for the People, R.E.M.'s eighth album, and it was the lead single in 1992, a strange, brooding choice that paid off. It was also the first song Michael Stipe wrote on a computer. Scott Litt produced it with the band, Clif Norrell engineered, and the two of them mixed it, and the sound is dark and hushed, an acoustic murmur that keeps threatening to boil over.

What really sets it apart is the orchestra creeping in around the edges: six violinists, three violists and three cellists, plus Deborah Workman's oboe, all adding a slow, mournful swell to Stipe's close, whispery vocal. It sounds like a lullaby for a generation that couldn't sleep.

It went to number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks, number two on Album Rock Tracks and 28 on the Hot 100, and reached 11 in Britain, at the time their second-biggest hit there. In Norway it climbed to number three, their biggest hit in that country until "Supernatural Superserious" in 2008. Peter Care directed the video in Los Angeles. Oddly, it was left off both of the band's Warner Bros. best-of collections, though a live "funk" arrangement, never recorded in the studio, turned up on the special edition of In Time. Its B-side, "Winged Mammal Theme", reworks the "Batman Theme" that was meant for Batman Returns and never used.

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