New Test Leper
"New Test Leper" | |
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Warner Bros. | |
Songwriter(s) | |
Producer(s) |
"New Test Leper" is a song by
Recording
The song was recorded at
The following month, on April 19, the band recorded an acoustic version of the song at the same location. That version was released as a B-side to the "
Songwriting and lyrics
The first line of the song contains the lyrics "I can't say that I love
"'New Test Leper' is something that we only played at soundcheck, like, twice," Buck explained in another interview, this time to Addicted to Noise's Michael Goldberg, also in 1996. "And for some reason, we just forgot about it and never really played it. I don’t know why. Michael just happened to luckily enough have it on tape. He says, 'I’ve got this great stuff for that song and none of us even remember playing it.' So we cut it here in Seattle when we did the record. I think it’s probably the most R.E.M.-ish sounding thing on the record. Literally, Michael was watching one of those talk shows and I think the subject was ‘People judge me by the way I look’ or something. Whereas I, when I have the misfortune to look for two minutes at one of those Oprah, Geraldo things, I just get revolted at everyone concerned: the audience, me. Michael actually looked at it and felt like, ‘Gosh, what if someone’s actually trying to communicate something to these people and this person who’s in this awful, tacky, degrading situation?’ So it’s written from that perspective. And I think probably having done press conferences in the past and being in those kinds of situations, there might be a little empathy from experience that we’ve had.”
According to Darryl White's R.E.M. Timeline, "New Test Leper" received its first live airing on May 31, 1997, at the
During R.E.M.'s performance on VH1 Storytellers in 1998, Stipe explained the background of the song he described as his "crowning achievement": how he initially (and, thankfully for him, erroneously) thought he'd stolen the song's "biggest line" - What a sad parade - from his friend Vic Chesnutt; how he wanted to write a follow-up to the only other song he knew that contained the word Jesus in the first line - namely Patti Smith's re-working of Van Morrison's "Gloria" ("Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine"); how he "wanted to write a song that was in the 6/8 polka kind of thing, but wanted the vocal to be contrapuntal; and how he quoted his favorite movie in the second verse ("I am not an animal," from The Elephant Man, a movie that Stipe says also inspired R.E.M.'s "Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)", amongst others).
Regarding Mike Mills' bass line, in 2023 he told Vulture: "I try to keep my bass lines a certain way, but for some reason with 'New Test Leper' I decided to basically play a bass solo all the way through the verses. You don't want the bass by itself, but in terms of free-forming and playing a lot of notes and having a lot of fun with it, I think 'New Test Leper' is the one where I took the guardrails off of it and had a good time."[4]
References
- Black, Johnny (2004). Reveal: The Story of R.E.M. London: Backbeat Books. ISBN 0-87930-776-5.
- ^ New Test Leper GER Promo CD Single by REM at eil.com
- ^ "R.E.M. Timeline - 1996/97/98 Concert Chronology". www.remtimeline.com. Retrieved 2024-01-27.
- ^ Black, p. 231
- ^ Ivie, Devon (2023-09-13). "The Most Heartfelt and Goofy of R.E.M., According to Mike Mills". Vulture. Retrieved 2024-01-27.