September Sang

For those of you unaware, September Sang is a newly discovered R.E.M. original that was played live once in 1982. It is not one of R.E.M.'s better unreleased songs. It's original form is so fragmented and loose that my attempts to bring it together as a more solid, complete song have stripped it of any character it may have once had. It's one of those cases where half way through the song I wonder why I started it and strive to finish it purely to make the time spent on it so far seem justified!

All that said, it's another rarity for the collection and that is, after all, the idea of this project.

Man On The Moon

This was always going to be the big one as far as I was concerned and it's not one I was originally going to cover, mainly because I was targeting the less known R.E.M. songs and avoiding the big hits. But, I decided to take this on (for a second time, I might add) simply through my love and appreciation for the song.

Man On The Moon is, in my opinion, the best song that R.E.M. have released as a single in their career. It it perfect for the radio without compromising their integrity in the way Shiny Happy People or Stand may have done.

I knew if I was going to take this on it had to be good. That's the danger of taking on the popular songs is everyone's heard them so many times that the inconsistencies with the original aren't missed so easily. I'll let you be the judge of whether this is as good as I'm making out!

The song basically consists of drums, bass, acoustic and electric guitar but over the top of that are the instruments that add to the song's character - the mandolin, the slide guitar and the piano parts during the verses.

And all I'm talking about here is the backing track - the vocals take this song to a new level, especially during the chorus where, by the end of the song, the vocal parts by Michael Stipe and Mike Mills help bring this song to a soaring climax.

I don't think I'll be taking on any more hit singles, this was definitely one I just had to get out of my system and I enjoyed every minute of dissecting every second of this classic song.

World Leader Pretend

In a sense this is a cover of a cover. The cover in question being the one I did in 2005 in my YouTube days!

This cover, like the 2005 one, is inspired by the way the song takes on a different slant just by being played at a slightly faster tempo live on Tourfilm. On my original cover I came up with a piano part for verses 1 and 2 which loosely follows the melody Peter Buck is playing on guitar in the live version. I liked this so much I kept it for this version. I also like how the drums kick in sooner than they do on the album version during the third verse i.e. after the piano solo part.

As a song I've never really found World Leader Pretend to be a very catchy song but nevertheless I've kind of respected it as an intelligent song and a key moment on Green, I prefer the way the song sounds live but I think Michael Stipe has always struggled with this one in a live setting because the vocal is very low, and somewhat sinister, which works great on record but it's hard for a vocal like that to project well in a large arena. Much later in R.E.M.'s touring career Stipe started toying with an alternative, higher vocal melody for this song, with limited success.

Bittersweet Me

I only really took on Bittersweet Me because I felt like New Adventures In Hi-Fi (along with Up) was one of the few albums I hadn't targeted for any of my covers, and it got me thinking about which song I would feel most confident covering.

I chose Bittersweet Me not just because I like it but because, having just finished Bang And Blame, I was able to use a lot of the same elements. It's surprising how much the two songs have in common: They both have a near identical tempo and drum part for the verse and they both share the same guitar sounds i.e. jangly during the verse, loud during the chorus. So, to sell myself short a little, it was a bit of a "save as" job!

As for the song itself, well it reminds me of turning up to school on a snowy day in 1996 only to be sent home because of the snow. Instead of going home I trudged in to town to buy the Bittersweet Me CD single and went home and listened to it and it's B-sides (I still maintain this CD release has some of the best B-sides they ever released) while watching the cars sliding around outside and getting stuck unable to get up the hill. So the song has a nice homely, wintery feel to it.

Bang And Blame

This is my third attempt at covering Bang And Blame. I don't think it's a song I would have been all that bothered about tackling if it weren't for my fondness for the version of the song they played on Saturday Night Live. This version is one of the B-sides of Tongue and also features in the Rough Cut documentary. 

Those of you who have heard this version will know that Peter Buck favours a guitar riff based around an A minor chord on the 5th/7th fret over the tremelo effect that appears on Monster. I'm not certain why he does this, maybe it's due to the technical difficulties of replicating the tremelo effect live, but the resulting sound is a gorgeous minor key riff that renders Bang And Blame almost unrecognisable for the opening few seconds. Aside from this moment of brilliance the performance is a bit sloppy with neither Peter Buck or Scott McCaughey quite knowing what to do during the verse.

My cover is basically a clone of the album version with the addition of the live guitar riff. Plus I've been getting a bit jangly and clean with my guitar sound recently so it's nice to turn the amp up and rock out a bit!

Wolves, Lower

Wolves, Lower was my favourite R.E.M. song for many years. When I first heard it, on Dead Letter Office, it affected me so much because I felt like, subconsciously, I'd heard this before somewhere, which can't have been possible being that I was only two years old when this song was released on the Chronic Town EP.

In my opinion, it is an amazing song considering it was written so early in the band's career. If Peter Buck's claims that he only knew three chords when the band first formed in Spring 1980 then it's a near miracle that 18 months later he was playing a guitar riff as complex as this. But it's the speed that the guitar riff is played at which is most astounding for a so-called "novice guitarist", plus...... there is an even faster demo of this song circulating amongst bootleggers, appropriately titled Wolves, Lower (Fast Version). I don't mind admitting that I didn't play this in one take, it took several attempts to get the bridge 4 note riff sounding only half decent.

I'm also aware there are some overdubs during the middle 8 and verse 3 missing from this cover that I didn't even attempt to re-create! There are rumours of Michael Stipe recording with a trash can over his head - I guess this is the stuff of legends that only producer Mitch Easter and Stipe himself would hold the key to...

All Things Considered

In case you're wondering, All Things Considered is the name assigned, by my fellow R.E.M. friend (and vocalist for this project) Rob Muhlbock, to an unknown R.E.M. original they played live once on June 25th 1982 at The I And I Club in Athens, Georgia. 

When he introduced it to me I had never heard it before or even heard of it. Though, in my opinion, I hadn't been missing much! It's a strange little song with an almost ska feel to it and completely unlike any other R.E.M. song at the time. He had to twist my arm to cover it and my first attempt to cover it I quickly discarded as being shit and would be reduced to being an "outtake" but, about a year later with some spare time on my hands, I gave it another go and I'm more pleased with it now.

With a song like this, where's there's no definitive version and the sound quality of the only recording of it is so poor, there's always an element of creativity involved, such as the decision to have the middle 8 also open the song.

Writing credits for this song...

Berry / Buck / Mills / Stipe / Butler / Muhlbock ;)

The Ascent Of Man

My decision to cover The Ascent Of Man was purely as a result of my love of the way the song was performed live in 2005 on the R.E.M. Live CD/DVD. I've always considered the song one of the best of a bad bunch from Around The Sun but when I heard the guitar on the live version I had visions of how this could have been so much better. The excellent guitar part is very much downplayed on the album version in favour of electronic instruments. The album version also starts to sound tediously slow when you've listened to the live version a couple of times. But the live version isn't perfect, it's marred by seemingly out of tune piano parts that aren't even necessary.

So my aim was to take the best assets from both versions and create a version of the song that exceeds both. Obviously I'm limited by my recording equipment and musical instruments but I'd like to think if this was worked up to recording studio standards then it would be a much better representation of what is, essentially, not a bad song at all.

Harborcoat

Harborcoat was another song that wasn't on my original list of songs to cover but, as the ideas for songs to cover dried up and my infatuation with Peter Buck's use of the Rickenbacker 360 blossomed, it became an obvious choice.

For me Harborcoat is an excellent showcase for what each member of the band brings to the music. Aside from Peter Buck's complex guitar picking we have another beautifully lively bass part from Mike Mills, as independent from Peter's guitar as his vocal melody is to Stipe's lead vocal. Then there are Bill Berry's drums which power their way through the song with intricate changes to the hi hat during the verse which further adds personality to the song.

It's not a bold rock classic like Summer Of 69 but a delicate little art-rock song from a quietly confident young band full of tiny musical details that add to its character, like the way Mike drops one of the bass notes an octave in the chorus during one of its repetitions, and the organised chaos of the middle 8 with some random harmonica from Stipe and some chaotic string scratching from Peter while all the time held together by Bill and Mike's steady rhythm section.

Catapult

A man in a guitar shop, who repaired my bass guitar once, asked me how I manage to play it without crippling my fingers. This was after I'd heard him muttering to his colleagues how he can't believe how shit these cheap bass guitars are and how poorly they are made. Lucky I didn't go in his shop the day after recording Catapult with blisters on my fingers. Yes, it's safe to say I have the strongest left hand in the UK and not for the derogatory reasons my friends would have you believe.

It was never my intention early on to tackle Catapult because, at the time, I had no bass guitar and was pessimistic about my ability to master some of the string-bending, intricate guitar parts. But alas, I got myself a cheap bass guitar and managed to approximate the guitar parts quite closely. Consequently it's now one of my top 10 favourites of all my cover songs. It's often the case that the after-thoughts actually become favourites.

The only variation from the Murmur original was in that I started the song in a similar way to how they performed it live at the time i.e. the drums don't kick in until after one bar of the bass riff, which I think is a nice touch.

Feeling Gravitys Pull

The danger with taking on a song with such an individual guitar sound as Feeling Gravitys Pull was that I could fall flat on my face right from the opening chords of the song. But I think I did OK for a non-Rickenbacker owner. 

I also had to get my head round harmonics on guitar - I've been playing guitar for 15 years and never really understood what harmonics were and how to play them, but it was important that I get it right for this song because they're such an important part of the main guitar riff. I'm never going to get them sounding as menacing as on the original but I think I'm at least half way there.

The original ending had the strings doing what they do on Fables Of The Reconstruction but, after four and a half minutes of crunchy-sounding electric guitar, the synthesised strings that come with Garageband sounded a bit weedy in comparison! So I opted to play the melody on electric guitar which I think works surprisingly well and is now one of my favourite parts of the song.

Eleventh Untitled Song

I won't lie, my reasons for covering this song were basically me thinking 1) What would be the quickest, easiest song to quickly knock out? 2) Having just sampled the drum intro to Exhuming McCarthy, what other R.E.M. songs are there where I can grab the drums from the album version during a drum solo? There aren't many solo drum parts in the R.E.M. discography and I have no desire whatsover to tackle How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us so Eleventh Untitled Song seemed the obvious choice!

I'm aware this is a tedious listen but I have high hopes for it once the vocals are added :)

King Of Birds

It was actually March Song from the Lifes Rich Pageant re-issue that was my inspiration to cover King Of Birds. Although it's a rough, somewhat tedious, early version of the song, hearing it like this inspired me to feature these raw elements more prominently in my cover. The "marching band" style drums are much more dominant in my cover than they are in the R.E.M. original.

But I knew something was missing and I knew what it was - the dulcimer. But not owning a dulcimer I had to decide whether to imitate this part on acoustic guitar or leave it out completely. I went with the former and I'm semi-pleased with the results. The opening to the song is so much powerful when it follows the dulcimer part than when it just starts with the big drums.

It was also a conscious attempt to tackle something different, I've done a lot of jangly early 1980s songs recently to the point where they almost become quite easy, so I wanted to challenge myself with this one.

Exhuming McCarthy

I have a confession to make. I stole the drum intro from the Stone Roses song I Am The Resurrection because it's practically identical and there was no way I was going to introduce this great song with just some shitty electronic drums courtsey of Apple's Garageband.

Having discovered the video on YouTube of the McCarthy hearings, containing the part sampled on the album version of the song, I simply had to take on this cover! It was also an opportunity to experiment with some brass instruments too - to limited success I might add!

In studying this song I learnt a lot about it and its structure, the way there is no clear verse or chorus and the final outro is played a few notes higher than it is when it features earlier in the song (I'm talking about the "sharpening stones, walking on coals" part).

Uberlin

One of those covers where I wonder why I ever chose to do it. I think at the time I still had a reasonable amount of enthusiasm for Collapse Into Now and, let's face it, Uberlin is one of the better songs on this album. Maybe it was also my attempt to broaden the range of covers that I've done, because there is a heavy bias towards the early material. I now think this sounds too electronic. Not one of my favourites.

The Worst Joke Ever

A cover from the so-called "over-produced" R.E.M. album. Initially I wanted to see how it would sound with only the guitars, bass, piano and drums, without all the electronic stuff. I ended up layering the song with more overdubs than I'd intended, like strings and tremolo effect guitars in the chorus simply because the song wasn't holding up too well in its stripped down format. I think we've done a great job here with what we have to work with but it's not one of my favourite covers, I'm still surprised this was the one song they plucked from Around The Sun to perform at the Dublin Rehearsals.

Skank

I had to be coaxed into covering this one. I've always considered this to be more of a jam session than a song. Despite it being "unreleased material" I always tended to skip past it because it has no real hook and never really grabbed me.

Songs like this are always a bit of a challenge to cover because there is no definitive version to match it to, I had to kind of scour through all the haphazard performances of this in the early 1980s and try to do my best. So there is always an element of creativity in songs like this because I have to decide myself what to do with the guitar during some of the improvised parts and how long to make the verses, plus how to start and end the song - because a lot of the time it was performed as a merge between songs.

I read somewhere that Michael once spoke "the opposite of plethora is dearth" repeatedly when performing this song! I've never heard this version but I love the line! For me I'm more familiar with him muttering something about "a marble table made of glass" and singing "taking overseas" just before the chorus kicks in.

Forty Second Song

Not much to add here. Forty Second Song was one of the first R.E.M. songs I'd heard prior to discovering them via Automatic For The People. I'd got hold of the cassette single of Shiny Happy People and this was the B-side and I remember timing it to see if it was actually forty seconds long! I've always had a fondness for it. Despite being a throwaway song it captures where the band were at in 1991 and listening to it, for me, conjures up that rural, pastoral feeling in a lot of songs, and the packaging, from Out Of Time.

Code For Living

In case you're wondering, Code For Living is a song named and semi-written by myself. A while before the release of Collapse Into Now remhq posted some short video clips of rehearsal sessions for the new album and one featured someone (possibly Stipe) with a handheld camera making their way towards a room where Peter Buck was playing a new guitar riff. I instantly recognised the lead guitar part he played when it appeared in All The Best but I thought I could write a better song using the three chord sequence he plays prior to the screeching lead guitar part.

So, the chorus of this song is my own contribution and the verse is as per the Peter Buck riff but I tried to imagine how the song would sound if it were worked up to completion in the studio.

Kohoutek

It wasn't until I started practicing the guitar parts to this and realising it didn't quite sound right that I realised that Peter Buck is using drop D tuning on his guitar in a similar way to Gardening At Night and, much later, Until The Day Is Done. Instantly it sounded right and also provided the key to getting the riff during the middle 8 sounding right - note how I'm reluctant to refer to this as "a guitar solo" because I feel it falls just short of qualifying.

Another feature of the song I picked up on was the volume of the acoustic guitars, they're quite a prominent feature in the song so I went along with this too. 

Note: The bass lick before the start of the third verse is actually there on the Fables Of The Reconstruction version it's just that it's so buried in the mix that it took the 25th Anniversary Fables demos CD to make me realise it even existed!

Gardening At Night

A more complex song to take on but one I felt necessary to cover as I do like the song and it's the band's self confessed "first song they were really pleased with". I say complex because of the bridge and all the psychedelic parts which give it a real dark, gothic sound. 

There are three main additions to the bridge which set this apart from being just another guitar, drums, bass arrangement. These are 1) A backwards guitar with a chorus effect applied to it. 2) A downward strum on the start of each chord which I have panned to the left and also applied a subtle chorus effect. 3) My favourite one, the little riff that sounds almost Indian in tone that I have played on acoustic guitar but would love to know what instrument was actually used on the Chronic Town version.

The other notable feature of this song is that it is played in drop D tuning which makes it sound extra jangly and makes those treble strings resonate and chime even more. It is one of three R.E.M. songs played in drop D tuning, the others being Kohoutek and Until The Day Is Done.

I've taken the extended intro from the way they used to play it live in the early 1980s, it would sometimes start off being played as a bit of a jam session reminiscent of Skank until the opening riff kicked in.

On a side note, I much prefer the Eponymous (harder vocal) version of this song to the softer vocal used on Chronic Town. I also like the way Stipe sang it live in the 1980s where he would kind of join the fragments of the verse rather than have clear breaks between lines - see the live version on the IRS extended release of Murmur.

7 Chinese Brothers

Where I work we have a music system with a huge catalog of bands and the idea is you add your preferred album to a playlist and you'll hear it at some point during the day. Well, someone put Reckoning on, knowing that I was an R.E.M. fan and, hours later, it just so happened that 7 Chinese Brothers came on sandwiched between two heavy rock songs and I remember thinking "Christ, I love this song but it sounds so weedy when placed next to two hard rock anthems"!

That was merely an observation! I still love the song, it's a really understated addition to Reckoning, far from being a classic but charming in its own way. I tackled this as part of my "Rickenbacker obsession" because I liked the layered guitars in the chorus and then the chiming notes during the middle 8. Plus, I like the way it's yet another early R.E.M. song where Mike Mills is playing melodic bass lines that are as vital as Peter's guitar.

I remember reading somewhere that Don Dixon had so much trouble getting a decent vocal performance out of Stipe on this track that he threw him the liner notes to The Revelaire's Joy Of Knowing Jesus which of course inspired the entertaining Voice Of Harold, he then performed the song in one take which is the one we hear on Reckoning.

Sitting Still

As a backing track I think this song sounds quite ordinary, but it served as a chance to experiment with the layering of guitars to try and achieve that "Rickenbacker 360" sound. Here I try all sorts of techniques to get that jangly sound from Murmur. I read somewhere in some R.E.M. book, I think it was Peter Buck saying that on Murmur and Reckoning there are loads and loads of guitars layered to achieve that sound, so I kind of took inspiration from this.

As for the R.E.M. version, it used to be a favourite of mine, however I've grown less keen on it over the years. I've always liked the obscurity of it and the fact that, for a first time listener, it's quite reasonable to say that there is only one line in the whole song where you can be confident you've heard the words properly and, ironically, that line is "I can hear".