R.E.M. — Losing My Religion

Peter Buck's mandolin figure is back across the global charts, appearing on 86 country and platform charts today after a two-month absence. The song built from an improvised riff into R.E.M.'s highest-charting U.S. hit, reaching number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and lifting the Athens band from cult status to arena scale on the strength of 1991's Out of Time, per Wikipedia. Michael Stipe's lyric of disillusionment and unrequited love pairs with Tarsem Singh's much-parsed video to keep it in circulation. In 2020, Netflix's Song Exploder devoted an episode to the track, reuniting all four members to break down its construction. Its jangle-pop template—no chorus in the conventional sense, a stringed instrument where a guitar hook should be—remains one of the stranger blueprints ever to reach a mass audience.