Automatic for the People

A black star floats against grey, its points stretching unevenly across the frame like a thing wrenched loose from somewhere. The metal looks weathered, pitted with light and shadow, the photographic detail sharp enough that you can read the wear in it. Behind it, faint embossed lines and curves ghost across the background, giving the whole image a pressed, tactile quality, as though the star were stamped into the surface rather than laid on top of it. In crisp white capitals across the top sits Automatic for the People, and just below the star's lower point, smaller but unmistakable, the three letters: R.E.M.

The star is real, and it had a previous life. Michael Stipe photographed it from the sign of the Sinbad Motel on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, a 'Neo-Lectra' or 'Sputnik star' of the kind that crowned countless American signs in the 1960s. The motel sat near Criteria Studios, where the band recorded most of the album, so the ornament was practically a neighbor.

There's a small tragedy folded into the picture. The Sinbad Motel still stands, but the star does not. Hurricane Andrew damaged it, and it never came back. What remains is the slanted support where it was once attached, an empty diagonal pointing at the sky. So the cover preserves something the storm erased: a roadside object photographed at the right moment, now surviving only as an image.

The star nearly gave the album its name. At one point the record was going to be called Star, which is exactly why this object ended up on the front. Producer Scott Litt told Mojo that Stipe had photographed the object and 'really dug' it, and that the photo got stuck up in the studio because 'it helps to have some kind of focus in the studio.' The literal focus on the wall became the literal focus of the sleeve.

The title that won out has nothing to do with Miami at all. Automatic for the People borrows the motto of Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods, an eatery in Athens, Georgia. So the cover and the title pull from two different places, a star from a Florida motel sign and a phrase from a Georgia soul-food kitchen, with no relationship between them beyond the band's own orbit.

Tom Recchion handled the design and typography of the packaging, with Warner Bros. Records as the design firm, and Stipe shared art direction and design duties. The clean white type and the muted greyscale palette let the star do all the work; nothing competes with it. The embossed pattern shadowing the background reappears inside the booklet, distorted, floating on white. The back cover photographs an old building, with the track listing written across it at the same tilted angle the building is seen from, so the words lean into the architecture instead of sitting flat over it. Elsewhere in the package, beach photographs of the band by Anton Corbijn turn up, alongside imaging work credited to Fredrik Nilsen and digital work by Cecil Juanarena at Insight Communications.

Even the physical object carried a hidden splash of color. The CD first shipped in a jewel case with a translucent yellow tray, chosen to match the yellow of the disc itself, with the cassette shell tinted the same shade. The yellow was later swapped for a standard opaque black tray, so early buyers held a warmer version than the ones that followed. On the outside, though, the impression never changed: a single battered star, lifted off a sign that a hurricane would soon take down, pinned to grey and made permanent.