Real ethereal: The beautiful bridge construction of REM’s ‘Star Me Kitten’While the band themselves were enjoying the most commercially successful period of their career, the REM fan base was starting to fracture a tad in the early 1990s. Sometimes the bridge or “middle eight” of a pop song can reset the vibe and bring in some call-and-response, like in OutKast’s ‘Hey-Ya’. Maybe the loveliest bridge in the band’s whole catalogue can be found on Automatic for the People, in the middle of one of the album’s otherwise less celebrated tracks, ‘Star Me Kitten’. The song, coming right after the up-tempo ‘Ignoreland’ on the record, effectively drops the listener into a hazy trance. On the record, though, it remains a little piece of perfection, uniting the various tribes of REM devotees at a midway point in the group’s career.