Based on a Dream: According to Bill Berry, the music box interlude in "Get Up" was directly lifted from a dream he had where 12 of them were going off at once; appropriately, the song's interlude indeed features 12 music boxes playing simultaneously. Berry described it as a lucky coincidence, as he didn't know what the song was about at that point.
Channel Hop: R.E.M. switched to working with Warner (Bros.) Records starting with this album, in part due to I.R.S. Records' dismal international distribution. The decision to sign with Warner came at the advice of Kate Pierson of The B-52s, who told Stipe that the label "never really tried to change us or tell us what to do," with Warner themselves confirming that they were willing to give R.E.M. full creative control.
Green received a promotional special edition release that packaged the album in a blue-gray digipak with a cloth case (meant to mimic the texture of tree bark), the band and title logo embossed, and the 4's debossed above the R's; the colors and texture tie in with the album's Green Aesop themes. From this album onwards, every one of R.E.M.'s albums until Accelerate would feature a special edition release.
The album was given a two-disc reissue in 2005 along with every other album in the band's Warner Bros. catalogue up to that point. Like those reissues, this one came with an expanded booklet and a DVD-A that featured the entire album done in a 5.1-channel surround sound mix (courtesy of acclaimed audio engineer Elliot Scheiner), a making-of documentary, performances from Tourfilm, and a complete set of lyrics.
In 2013, Green became the first of the group's Warner Bros. albums to receive a 25th anniversary reissue (after each of the band's five I.R.S. Records albums had previously gotten one), featuring a newly-remastered edition of the album, a 1989 concert performance from the Green World Tour in — appropriately enough — Greensboro, North Carolina, four postcards (depicting the band members), expanded liner notes, and a fold-out poster.
Meaningful Release Date: An intentional example. Appropriately enough for the political lyrical content, the album was released on Election Day, 1988.
No Export for You: Despite its success in Europe and as a promotional release on American radio, the "Orange Crush" single went unreleased in the United States. Despite this, the song topped the charts for both Billboard's Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock, the latter of which was established the year of the album's release.
Parks and Recreation features Ben producing a Stop Motion short to the tune of "Stand". It doesn't even get past the opening line.
Screwed by the Network: One of the reasons the band moved to Warner Bros. was that I.R.S. had poor distribution overseas. Specifically, MCA, who became I.R.S.'s main distributor in 1985 (taking over from A&M Records), had been pushing R.E.M. to record commercially viable material but at the same time didn't consider them a good enough priority for... well, much of anything, really, much less to give strong international distribution to. This was a problem that many other alternative bands faced on cash-strapped independent labels that didn't have the benefit of a major label distributor. Fellow alternative band Hüsker Dü cited their own distribution problems with SST, also distributed by MCA at the time, for making the move to Warner in 1986.
Peter Buck: [I remember] being told by MCA's head of promotion at the time of Lifes Rich Pageant, "We're not going to promote this record, because there aren't any hit singles." I mean, he's sitting there telling me this.
As mentioned on the main page, the 4's spot varnished/superimposed over the R's on the front cover and the listing of "Stand" (the fourth track on the album) as track number "R" stemmed from a typo made when typing out the album title; since the 4 key is right above the R key on a typical keyboard, the title ended up being spelled G4een, and the band liked the effect enough to make use of it.
The introduction of acoustic elements on the album originated during a jam session, where a disgruntled Bill Berry abruptly shouted "fuck this!" and got up from his drum kit to grab an acoustic guitar. Peter Buck responded by picking up a mandolin, and things snowballed from there.
R.E.M. originally envisioned Green as being a Distinct Single Album, where one side would contain electric guitar-driven songs and the other acoustic songs. This never came to fruition due to a lack of good acoustic material, but the band would eventually release an acoustic album in the form of Automatic for the People four years later. These original plans may be partly why the LP release of Green features an "Air" side and a "Metal" side, in addition to the Green Aesop themes in the lyrics.
Some promotional cassettes of Green contain different mixes for "World Leader Pretend", "Turn You Inside-Out", and "11." than what was ultimately included on the final release.
According to Mike Mills, "World Leader Pretend" was originally envisioned as a "pop hit" before Michael Stipe gave a more somber vocal performance on it, after which the rest of the track was rearranged to match. Mills admitted that it took some time for him to warm up to Stipe's take on it.
Working Title: "The Wrong Child" was recorded and mixed under the title "Mozart" before eventually being given its final name.
This album was the first by R.E.M. to feature lyrics printed in the liner notes; however, the lyrics only cover the song "World Leader Pretend". Later albums would continue leaving the lyrics absent, until Up in 1998 finally broke the trend and printed all the lyrics to every song in full. This would be continued on the band's post-Up albums all the way until Collapse into Now. Stipe gave his reasoning for including the "World Leader Pretend" lyrics as follows:
"The reason we chose to print the lyrics of that song is that song, more than other for me, really stated what Green was about. If there has to be synopsis of the title, why we chose to call the record Green, that song does it. Kind of the statement and intent of the song is you pretty much have to straighten out what's going on with yourself before doing anything else outside of yourself."
