All The Way To Reno

My first exposure to this song was when they played it live on Later With Jools Holland in 2001 and I remember thinking this was the most exciting new R.E.M. song I'd heard since the mid 1990s. I loved the chorus, thinking it was really catchy and that the song could become a real big hit.

But when Reveal came out I was so disappointed to hear what they had done with the song. The guitars were kept to a real minimum, except for the chiming solo notes at the end of each verse and chorus which were actually the album version's main redeeming feature. The tempo was slowed down to a crawl depriving the song of its sense of urgency and making the chorus sappy rather than edgy. Finally, layers of overdubs, backwards loops and sound effects were added.

So why cover the song you may ask? Well, the band made a lot of production errors after they lost their quality control department – Mr Bill Berry. It doesn't mean the songs are poor, just that that they are treated wrong. My aim, as is often the case, is to provide an alternative studio take to what we ended up with on Reveal. I do backtrack though, there are elements of the album version which I've kept because I like them, such as the strings, the lead guitar parts and the occasional backwards guitar loop. In terms of tempo mine is a compromise between the live version and the album version though I wish I'd leaned more towards the tempo of the Jools Holland version which I like the most.