Frontman Michael Stipe has said that this track, which tells the story of a teenage séance gone wrong, was about adolescent humiliation and the kinds of things that follow you through your life. Billboard magazine asked Stipe what inspired him to write such a song now, long after adolescence. The REM frontman replied: "We all have our geek moments that we kind of carry with that or us have some impact on us throughout our lives [laughs]. I hate to use the term 'geek anthem' but it's a little bit, for me, like that. I have friends - who are adults - who move with such grace and poise through life and in fact completely embrace the incredibly stupid aspects of growing up and the humiliating teenage moments. They can totally laugh about and make fun of themselves and allow themselves to be, I think, more of a complete adult because of it. So that was really kind of the inspiration for the song."
The interviewer then commented on the way that after harboring things for years, decades later we think, "Why am I thinking about this now?" Stipe replied: "Yeah, it's like that one horrifying school picture where you either knew or didn't know that that was the day they were taking the school picture. Okay, so now anyone in the world can now pull that up online if they want to look at you when you were in sixth grade and had, whatever, really stupid glasses. But the song inhabits an almost more internal humiliation, something that happens to all of us because we were all kids and we all have insecurities on some level or the other. This one, I kind of particularly wrote it around a séance gone horribly wrong at a summer camp that then manifested itself later in life as kind of a sexual deviance, but a fun one."
Frontman Michael Stipe has said that this track, which tells the story of a teenage séance gone wrong, was about adolescent humiliation and the kinds of things that follow you through your life. Billboard magazine asked Stipe what inspired him to write such a song now, long after adolescence. The REM frontman replied: "We all have our geek moments that we kind of carry with that or us have some impact on us throughout our lives [laughs]. I hate to use the term 'geek anthem' but it's a little bit, for me, like that. I have friends - who are adults - who move with such grace and poise through life and in fact completely embrace the incredibly stupid aspects of growing up and the humiliating teenage moments. They can totally laugh about and make fun of themselves and allow themselves to be, I think, more of a complete adult because of it. So that was really kind of the inspiration for the song."
The interviewer then commented on the way that after harboring things for years, decades later we think, "Why am I thinking about this now?" Stipe replied: "Yeah, it's like that one horrifying school picture where you either knew or didn't know that that was the day they were taking the school picture. Okay, so now anyone in the world can now pull that up online if they want to look at you when you were in sixth grade and had, whatever, really stupid glasses. But the song inhabits an almost more internal humiliation, something that happens to all of us because we were all kids and we all have insecurities on some level or the other. This one, I kind of particularly wrote it around a séance gone horribly wrong at a summer camp that then manifested itself later in life as kind of a sexual deviance, but a fun one."