“Driver 8” by R.E.M.

"Driver 8" rolls out of Fables of the Reconstruction, R.E.M.'s third album, and it went out as the second single from it in September 1985. It's a song about the railroad, specifically the Southern Crescent, the passenger train the Southern Railroad ran until 1979 and which carries on, making fewer stops, as the Amtrak Crescent. Michael Stipe sings it with a dreamy, faraway calm, like a man watching the countryside blur past a window.

Joe Boyd produced it for I.R.S., and the band sounds locked in: Peter Buck's guitar chiming in circles like wheels on a track, Mike Mills on bass, Bill Berry driving from the drum stool, and a harmonica blown to mimic a train whistle. All four share the writing credit. The video follows Chessie System trains around Clifton Forge, Virginia.

The song had a long afterlife inside the band too. Buck later admitted, in the liner notes for In Time, that the verse chords of "Imitation of Life" had been borrowed from "Driver 8" by accident, and Stipe said in a 2009 interview that singing it came to him as naturally as breathing. On the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart it got as high as 22.

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