end of "Just a Touch" Michael Stipe can be heard screaming the line "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young", quoting longtime influence Patti Smith's live cover version of The Who's "My Generation" released on the b-side of her 1976 single "Gloria", which she also uses at the end of her cover version of "Privilege (Set Me Free)" from her 1978 album Easter. Recording and production During the first half of 1986, the band took a break from touring to recover energy. They wanted to make a change from the sound of their previous album, with Mills saying "We wanted to get away from the sort of murky feelings and sounds that we got out of Joe in London". They wanted a "really hard-driving record, but we also like to throw in a lot of things: pianos and organs and accordions and banjos and what-not" and considered working with Gehman as they liked the acoustic sound of his work with John Mellencamp. They initially met for an extensive demo session at John Keane's Studio in Athens, Georgia, in March 1986 (These recordings would later be released as the "Athens Demos" on the 25th anniversary re-release of the album). After being initially skeptical, they embraced the new recording process with Gehman later stating that:"I liked to spend time on the arrangement and layer in the overdubs and comp the vocals—all this process which, to me, was normal record-making, they had never been through before. When they saw that kind of record-making process didn't take anything away—that it actually added another level of artistic expression—they were very excited by it."The album was recorded at John Mellencamp's Belmont Mall Recording Studios in Belmont, Indiana, in April and May 1986. The recording studio was larger and had newer technology than they were used to, and they enjoyed the town, attending many concerts while there. The band were also happy with the production of the record and the extra clarity of the vocals:"Don (Gehman, the album's producer) is good at layering things so there can be a lot of things going on but you can still hear everything. And as far as Michael's vocals go, it's a combination of things: Michael is getting better at what he's doing, and he's getting more confident at it. And I think that shows up in the projection of his voice. The overall sound of everything was so good,