10 Best Soft Rock Albums Of All Time

One of the biggest problems that you have to face in rock and roll is what happens when you grow up. Since this is supposed to be the music that you could lash out against your parents with, it gets a bit harder to manage when you have to worry about your own mortality and think of the days past your 20s. Although most of the good rock fades away after that mark, Automatic for the People is when you use that feeling as your fuel.

Released in the midst of the grunge movement, this one record feels like R.E.M. took every element that made Losing My Religion the pop juggernaut it is and increased it tenfold, with songs that are a lot more orchestrated and feel more in tune with the mellow side of rock. That might be a good thing though, since a lot of the lyrics are reflective of what happens when you grow old, like facing your own death in Try Not to Breathe or learning to move on after losing a friend on Sweetness Follows.

If there's one song that says it all for the record though, it would have to be Nightswimming. Without any distortion or guitar pedals, this song has as much angst as any grunge rock song ever could, as Michael Stipe thinks about the days when things were a lot more innocent. If anything, that's what makes this record so powerful as the years go on. It's a snapshot of a time that was a lot happier, but you know that you'll never be able to fully go back ever again. So it's better to smile because it happened.