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".