“Photograph” was written for Automatic For The People, but for whatever reason, it was abandoned and completed later on with Natalie Merchant for inclusion on the pro-choice benefit album Born To Choose. (This was a pretty nice record, by the way — it also featured a spirited live recording of the Beatles’ “She Said, She Said” by Matthew Sweet, and “Greenlander,” one of Pavement’s all-time best non-album tracks.) Stylistically, it’s more or less exactly what a somewhat cynical person might expect of R.E.M. in the early ’90s: Mid-tempo yet perky, and almost a bit too tasteful in its arrangement. The song is very well crafted and incredibly ingratiating, but it’s not hard to understand why it was cast aside — it’s a bit too neutral in tone for Automatic For The People, and it’s perhaps one step too far into inoffensive, toothless coffee shop pop."
"This live performance of John Prine's "Hello in There" is a must-see if you're a fan of Prine, Michael Stipe, Natalie Merchant, or Billy Bragg. I happen to be a huge fan of all of them, so seeing Stipe, Merchant, and Bragg performing one of my favorite Prine songs is a great pleasure—I hope you enjoy it too! According to Natalie Merchant's YouTube site, which uploaded the video, it was recorded in 1990, in Glasgow, Scotland – "a first concert stop before heading to the former Soviet Bloc just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall."