R.E.M. released the 1991 album Out of Time, featuring “Losing My Religion.” The album was the American band’s major commercial breakthrough and became their first number-one album in the United States.
“Losing My Religion” was not a literal statement about leaving a faith. The phrase is an expression from the American South meaning to lose patience or composure. Peter Buck’s distinctive mandolin part helped make the song one of the best-known alternative-rock recordings of the early 1990s.
Out of Time also includes “Shiny Happy People,” “Near Wild Heaven,” and “Country Feedback.” It preceded R.E.M.’s 1992 album Automatic for the People, which contained “Everybody Hurts” and “Man on the Moon.”