"Try Not to Breathe" is a pretty bleak command. And, indeed, the second track from R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People is about death. But the song's title originated with a much more innocuous statement. During the demo stages for the album, which would come out in October 1992, guitarist Peter Buck was recording the groundwork for a possible new tune on acoustic guitar. "We were doing the demo, and I had the mic for my guitar right up against my mouth. I was kind of huffing," Buck told Melody Maker in 1992. "So John [Keane], the engineer, said, 'You're making too much noise.' So I said, 'OK, take two. I'll try not to breathe.' I just meant that I wouldn't breathe during the take. But Michael [Stipe] heard it and said, 'Oh, that’s a nice title.'"
"No No No is a world away from its predecessor. That album shared some common ground with the rest of the Beirut catalogue in that at its heart was genuine, ramshackle charm; this new record, though, is an exercise in elegance and poise. Given the bleak personal circumstances that frame its gestation, it is remarkably mellow - chirpy, almost, on the likes of ‘Perth’, a song named after the town in which Condon reached his nadir in 2013, and ‘Gibraltar’. The tracks sound low-key, but in fact, they’re cleverly taut compositions - the album runs just short of 30 minutes, and not a second goes to waste."
