Trivia / Lifes Rich Pageant

• Creative Differences: According to Michael Stipe, he and producer Don Gehman occasionally clashed over their different approaches to lyrical content. Gehman favored the idea of songs being easily decipherable, while Stipe attempted to continue his usual opaque writing style. Despite this, Stipe considered these clashes beneficial, feeling that Gehman's willingness to challenge him helped make his lyrics less self-indulgent.
• Creator Recovery: The more energetic musical and lyrical tone of the album was noticeably influenced by the band recovering from a huge personal nadir that they'd been wrestling with during the making of Fables of the Reconstruction; Michael Stipe in particular described how he felt a huge sense of renewal at the time, which influenced his lyrics on the album.
• Refitted for Sequel: "I Believe" was reworked from "When I Was Young", a track recorded for Fables of the Reconstruction that was dropped at the last minute (so late, in fact, that it's still listed in the liner notes).
• Throw It In!: The banjo intro to "I Believe" was actually an unrelated clip of Peter Buck messing around on the banjo, recorded without his knowledge and stuck onto the song for the hell of it.
• What Could Have Been: Like Reckoning before it, Lifes Rich Pageant was originally devised as a double-album, with various interludes between tracks. Once again, the idea was axed in favor of a single LP due to commercial concerns, though a few remnants of the multi-interlude concept did remain in the form of "Underneath the Bunker" and the pull-string doll intro to "Superman".

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