R.E.M.’s song "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" was the second single released from their 1987 album, Document.
Speaking with Q magazine in 1992, lead singer Michael Stipe explained, "The words come from everywhere. I'm extremely aware of everything around me, whether I am in a sleeping state, awake, dream-state or just in day to day life. There's a part in 'It's The End Of The World As We Know It' that came from a dream where I was at Lester Bangs' birthday party and I was the only person there whose initials weren't L.B. So there was Lenny Bruce, Leonid Brezhnev, Leonard Bernstein... So that ended up in the song along with a lot of stuff I'd seen when I was flipping TV channels. It's a collection of streams of consciousness."
This was heavily influenced by the way Bob Dylan sang "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Stipe had once imitated Dylan in a low-budget film called Just Like a Movie, which was a play on the Dylan song "Just Like A Woman."
