R.E.M. - (DON’T GO BACK TO) ROCKVILLE

Released: October 16, 1984

Album: Reckoning

When R.E.M. released “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” in 1984 as the second and final single from their album “Reckoning”, the song didn’t make a dent on the charts. It failed to appear on either the Billboard Hot 100 or the UK Singles Chart. Yet over time, this heartfelt track—part love letter, part lament—became a fan favorite and a cornerstone of the band’s early years, illustrating the tenderness and small-town melancholy that made R.E.M. so relatable in the 1980s.

The song was written by bassist Mike Mills, though credited, as was the band’s custom, to all four members of R.E.M. Mills composed it as a plea to his then-girlfriend Ingrid Schorr, asking her not to leave Athens, Georgia, to return home to Rockville, Maryland. At the time, both were students at the University of Georgia, and their relationship was just beginning when summer loomed and Schorr’s parents insisted she come home.

According to Schorr, the inspiration for the song came one night at a local Athens club called Tyrone’s, as the couple talked about her impending departure. “I finally meet a girl I like and she’s got to go back to Rockville,” Mills reportedly said. That offhand remark became the emotional nucleus of the song.

Schorr herself later reflected on the song with warmth and humor. Writing in Hermenaut magazine, she explained, “The lyrics, like their author, are endearingly straightforward. The song isn’t so much about me as about my taking off for some other place, leaving him behind: ‘I know it might sound strange but I believe you’ll be coming back before too long.’”

Schorr did, in fact, return to Rockville for the summer—but she came back to Athens, completed her journalism degree, and eventually built a career in the arts, working for Brandeis University. She has since expressed amusement at the various myths surrounding her and the song’s origin that have circulated among fans.

Originally, “Rockville” had a punk/thrash arrangement, according to guitarist Peter Buck. But for the album recording, the band reimagined it in a country-inspired style—partly, Buck said, as a joke aimed at their manager Bertis Downs, who wasn’t a fan of country music. The humor backfired beautifully: the song’s gentle twang, jangling guitars, and plaintive harmonies turned it into one of R.E.M.’s most tender early works. While Michael Stipe sings lead on the studio version, Mills took over lead vocals in many live performances.

The lyrics portray Rockville as a grim, factory-filled place—“full-time filth,” as Stipe sings—but that’s pure fiction. In reality, Rockville is a well-off suburb of Washington, D.C. Still, for a restless college kid in love, it represented everything dull and constraining that Athens—then a vibrant center of alternative music and creativity—was not.