It is more than apt that R.E.M's best song in over a decade, "We All Go Back To Where We belong" is also their last song. I wouldn't even bet on the inevitable reunion tour five years hence -despite my problems with the band, they aren't the type for cheap displays of emotion in return for bucks.
The song has the clear water not waving but drowning beauty of a "Nightswimming" with horns that sound as though they've escaped from a Burt Bacharah and Hal David 60s classic, a "What The World Needs Now" or a Herb Alpert version. Actually, it sounds a bit like the horns at the end of "What Do You Get If You Fall In Love".
Whatever the influence outside, inside, the taste of the ocean on your skin lyric suggests a nostalgia, a return but also a moving forward: it's like the way as you grow older, time feels. At first you are nostalgic for a time and place and then as you recover you are nostalgic for nostalgia. There is a remove to the emotions being described and as much as it is over it is moving because time is moving.
It is also as much a hello as a goodbye, it is a finishing end that opens up by chance.
A real beauty.
Grade: A