Disturbance At The Heron House

Along with Welcome To The Occupation this is one of my favourite songs on Document. I'd describe it as an intelligent rock song, a very mature song considering all of R.E.M. were only in their late twenties when they wrote this song.

It is relatively straightforward in terms of structure and even features a rare Peter Buck guitar solo. But it's the opening riff that I most admire about the song, on the album it sounds clean and polished, whereas live it takes on a mechanical, dirty sound. Though I haven't got the riff spot on I'm certainly playing it better than I would have done two years ago! It's a really difficult riff to play, there are a multitude of notes crammed into a very short space of time (I will encounter similar difficulties when I tackle Pretty Persuasion!) made to sound easy when played by Peter Buck.

The Lifting

I was talked into covering The Lifting by a friend who loves the song. Initially I said I wasn't even going to attempt to reproduce the rich (arguably over-produced) electronic textures of the album version. So he sent me a live version performed in Rio in 2001 and, at first, I wasn't over-keen on this either. So he set me the task of taking the best of both versions and merging them into one which I thought could sound embarassingly bad but ended up being something I'm quite proud of.

In listening to the song carefully I grew to appreciate it more and more and it's now one of my favourite songs on Reveal. I also really love the slowed down demo version (B-side of Imitation of Life) and could have gone down that route also. I do much prefer the chorus on the slower version but can see why it wouldn't have worked sped up.

On another note, I also prefer the demo version of Beat A Drum to the album version. It means more to me than the album version which, again, feels over-produced and strips the song of all it's intensity and emotion.

Driver 8

Driver 8 is the quintessential mid 1980's R.E.M. song full of railway imagery and homesickness. It's also a fairly straightforward song musically and, taking the obscurity of Fables into consideration, relatively mainstream.

They wrote the song I believe in 1984 and played it several times throughout the Reckoning Tour and, needless to say, it was a staple of their set during the Reconstruction tour but not played a great deal since. My cover is based on the Fables album version with the acoustic guitars quite prominent running alongside the jangly electric guitar and another of Mike Mills's driving bass lines. Sky blue bells ringing......

Green Instrumental

Like Title, this is another great abandoned song from the early Green sessions, cast aside probably because it sounds "too R.E.M." and didn't fit with the new experimental sound of Green. Which I suppose it does, it sounds like a song written by an R.E.M. fan so wrapped up in their favourite band that they are unable to come up with anything other than jangly minor-chord songs.

This one has no vocal from Stipe, possibly another reason why it was abandoned, maybe a vocal melody just didn't fit. So, once again, this is my attempt to perform and record the song as though it were actually recorded by the band. Of course there is a studio recording of this out there amongst bootleggers which would be superb if it were not for the extremely poor, compressed audio quality that renders the song quite grating.

Instrumentally it's fairly straightforward, drums, bass guitar, Peter's Rickenbacker centre-left and an acoustic guitar strumming in the far right.

Perfect Circle (1982 Live Version)

Don't get me wrong, I love the album version of Perfect Circle, I think it is one of Murmur's strongest songs, but there is something about the early live version, played at The Strand in 1982, that I find hauntingly good. Hearing this I think Perfect Circle could have gone in a completely different direction and still have been a great song but probably no longer suited to Murmur.

The live version features Bill Berry taking a break from the drum kit to switch on a casio keyboard for the rest of the band to join in when they are ready. There is no piano and much more emphasis on strummed guitar. It's also very slightly faster which I think does the song no harm (I particularly like the tempo of the song played live on the Green Tour - see Tourfilm).

What I've tried to do here is produce a version of how the song might have sounded if it were recorded in the style of its earlier live version.

Letter Never Sent

After finishing Pilgrimage, Letter Never Sent felt like a walk in the park in terms of song density. It's a fairly basic song, there's not all that much going on, there's a distant fuzzy electric guitar during the chorus and a few additional strums throughout the third verse. I like the way the guitar riff changes on the third verse which is something you only notice subliminally - something the band either forgot or chose to abandon when they played this song at the Dublin rehearsals in 2007.

Where I fall short on this cover is failing to get the guitar sound right for the intro/verse riff. It sounds like Peter's Rickenbacker very cleanly recorded and double tracked. With no reverb whatsoever it is very upfront in the mix, a technique used on Mike Mill's vocals in the song which sound so crisp on the album recording.

Pilgrimage

Another dense, layered Murmur track. With Pilgrimage I faced the production challenges of Radio Free Europe but Pilgrimage fell together much quicker. A common occurrence on Murmur is to have the bass piano echoing what the bass guitar is doing and this couldn't be better illustrated than on this song.

Missing from this cover version are the vibes that Mitch Easter were reportedly playing throughout this song. Other than that I'm fairly pleased with how this cover has turned out.

Talk About The Passion

One of my favourite guitar riffs in the R.E.M. discography and I'm still unsure how they got that sound. My best guess is that it's Peter's Rickenbacker 12 string and an acoustic guitar playing the same part, hence creating a really gothic-sounding guitar sound that I've failed miserably to reproduce! Then you've got the jangly cystal-like guitar part at the end of verse 2 and verse 3 and accompanying the chorus.

I think so far I've done a pretty good job of getting by without owning the correct instruments, until this! A Rickenbacker 360 and a cello would have been useful for this one!

Radio Free Europe

This has been the hardest song I've covered so far. I had a choice whether to go for the raw live sound (as played live on The Tube in 1983, for example) or to take on the mammoth task of recreating the intricately produced album version. I chose the latter.

Covering this made me appreciate how much mixing and production went into making Murmur compared to Reckoning. Production-wise it plays more like a Sparklehorse song than an early R.E.M. song, it's so clean and every instrument has its own distinct space in the aural spectrum. There's so much going on instrumentally and yet it doesn't sound crowded. I much prefer the Murmur version to the one that appeared on Eponymous, the only thing the Eponymous version had going for it was its pace, it might have been nice to hear the Murmur version with a slighly faster tempo. In hindsight, maybe I should have tried that with my cover.

The Wrong Child

I wasn't going to cover this one for the simple reason that I don't own or play a mandolin. But I decided not to let a small detail like that stop me! I discovered that playing the high E string of an acoustic guitar very high up the fret and ever so slightly muting the string does a pretty good job of emulating the mandolin.

Once I'd figured out a rough approximation of the mandolin part this song was a pleasure to record. It was quite refreshing not to have to worry about drums or bass guitar. A lot of my recordings sound so rigid and robotic because I'm working to a 100% accurate computer-generated click track, stripping the song of all rhythmic error and hence personality. So it was great to throw all that aside for this song and the results are, I hope, quite pleasant.

It's A Free World Baby

It's often been said by fans that It's A Free World Baby (alongside another unreleased song, Fretless) should have been included on Out Of Time. While I agree that both are superior to a song like Texarkana or Me In Honey, for example, I feel they wouldn't have suited the mood or flow of the album. So, it's probably best that these two songs stand alone as individual B-sides.

It's A Free World Baby is a really fun song with its quirky verse and a catchy, relatively mainsteam (by R.E.M. standards) bridge/chorus, it comes across as a real gem of a song that didn't see official release only due to the fact it's not like anything else the band were doing at that time.

Instrumentally, the verse was quite hard to recreate, because there is very little going on in terms of melody. But the bridge and chorus were relatively straightforward.

What If We Give It Away?

I've heard the word "filler" applied to this song when talking about Lifes Rich Pageant. I wouldn't go so far as to called it a "filler" but it's definitely one of the weaker songs on the album. It's all surface and no depth, on first listen it's got a lovely-sounding vocal from Michael Stipe and the song as a whole is very archetypical R.E.M. But that's pretty much all you have. It also doesn't really have a proper chorus, which is no bad thing of course (neither does Country Feedback), but in the case of What If We Give It Away it comes across as being sub standard and unfinished.

As with many songs on Lifes Rich Pageant it is a re-working of an undeveloped song from their live set, in this case going back as far as 1981 when it was played a couple of times under the title Get On Their Way.

Lifes Rich Pageant is an odd album, with several re-worked old songs, an obscure cover song and a light-hearted instrumental, on paper Lifes Rich Pageant sounds like an album by a band who were clutching at creative straws. But, this is far from true. Lifes Rich Pageant is a grand step forward for the band, a celebratory statement from a band emerging from a dark period and, in this context, maybe What If We Give It Away does have a place here.

Stumble

Here's one for Halloween, no, not the scarily bad bass playing but the ghoulish sound effects during the song's Middle 8! I spent a long time looking for audio clips of "tortured screams" until it dawned on me that the eerie sound heard amongst the backwards guitars during the middle 8 is actually the sound of howling wind.

Stumble is a strange one, at 5 minutes and 41 seconds it's one of the longest songs R.E.M. have ever recorded, at a time in their career when everything was short, fast and straight to the point. But it's not long in a Pink Floyd/epic kind of way, more in a purposefully obscure way. It's more of a showcase for where R.E.M. were at in 1982. Interestingly it was never played live anywhere near as many times as the other songs on Chronic Town.

But despite not having the longevity of some of its neighbouring songs it's a great song nevertheless and I hope my cover goes part the way to doing it justice.

Until The Day Is Done

I know Until The Day Is Done isn't really what Accelerate is all about, and I feel like a bit of an old school R.E.M. fan for saying this but, this is probably my favourite track on Accelerate. It's also the direction I would love them to take for their next album.

Until The Day Is Done is a 3/4 tempo politically charged ballad played predominantly on an acoustic guitar in Drop D tuning - I think I'm right in saying the first time this tuning has been employed by the band since Gardening At Night back in 1982. It's based around a guitar riff that I believe first saw the light back in 1992 around the time Automatic For The People was being written, which probably goes a long way to explaining why I particularly like this song!

It is, however, my least favourite piece of audio production on Accelerate. I could write a separate account for my disapointment with Jacknife Lee's work on Accelerate but I will save that for another time. It really does just sound like layers of mud, even the quieter verses sound mono and cloudy and I believe there is as much unwanted clipping/compression during the chorus as there is on some of the really loud songs on Accelerate. I don't mean to sound disrespectful towards Jacknife Lee because it's good the band have opted for a fresh producer and some of his work is quite edgy and dynamic but I can't help wishing someone like Scott Litt had produced this particular song.

'Chorus And The Ring'

Probably my favourite song from 2001's Reveal, an album largely dominated by electronic music, Chorus And The Ring gives old fans a little of what they've been waiting for since Automatic For The People. But only a little.

I'm pleased with how this cover has turned out. Hopefully all the details are in there, the flutes (if indeed they are flutes), the organs, the throbbing distorted noise which I can only assume is a crazily distorted bass guitar! I like the fact there is vey little percussion in this song, which enabled me to give it a more human, less rigid, feel. I was able to fit the percussion around the guitars rather than the other way round.

'Try Not To Breathe'

In my opinion, I believe this to be the best song that R.E.M. have written in their career. If 1992's Automatic For The People was their creative peak then Try Not To Breathe is a creative peak within a creative peak. There's an effortless charm about this song. These days the band would have to work hard and long to create a piece of music only 80% as memorable as this.

Try Not To Breathe is a chorus of organs weaving their way through the song guided by a lively bass line and accompanied by a rhythmic acoustic guitar played with some passion by Peter Buck. Musically it's quite complex, which probably explains why they never recreated this live except for on the Monster tour where it was played a few times as a rock song with electric guitars and none of the finer details of the album recording.

I'm aware I've stole the intro from the album version and looped it all the way through! But the rest is my own work. If a cover of a song like Second Guessing might fall together relatively quickly then this is the exact opposite. As a guitarist it took great determination to cover this one because the guitar alone just doesn't do the job, it's the organs and the bass that drive the song.

'Camera'

I don't really have much to say about this one except that I'm really proud of the wind chimes in the third verse! Camera is a tender moment on an otherwise energetic album but it's not one of my all time favourites.

I'm going to go off on a complete tangent now and talk about the idea that "less is more" which is something I'm slowly realising as I listen harder to songs in preparation for covering them. If I have spent a long long time getting an organ melody right or there's a guitar part I feel I can play particularly well there's a tendency to want to show off and boost the volume of these parts. But I'm discovering this isn't necessary. Keeping these musical achievements low in the mix adds to the longevity of the song and prevents aural "overcrowding" whereby all instruments are competing to be heard leading to a tiring listening experience. In this recording, for example, I was really pleased that I'd gone to great lengths to get my hands on some wind chimes and there was the temptation to "pollute" the third verse with them. I practiced self restraint and kept them really quiet and I think the song is all the better for it.

'Welcome To The Occupation'

One of my favourite R.E.M. songs and the only jangly folk song on Document. It also features one of my favourite dual Stipe vocals of all time.

I read somewhere that there is no acoustic guitar in this song, despite it sounding like there is. Apparently, it just features some very complex percussion work from Bill Berry that gives the impression of light strumming. So, not having the percussion skills, or the eyebrows, of Bill Berry I have included an acoustic guitar but removed all but the highest of frequencies to give it the percussion effect, or not, as the case may be!

As a cover, though I'm pleased with this, it's not one of my favourites. It's just too instrumentally sparse to do anything with. I'm working on Chorus And The Ring at the moment and because there's so much going on in that song it sounds really good when I started adding all the elements, but Welcome To The Occupation is quite the opposite. I have a friend who will be working on vocals for these songs next year and I think this will then go from being one of my least favourite to one of my favourites!

"Old Man Kensey"

Old Man Kensey may well be my favourite Fables song. If not then it certainly has my favourite middle 8 in the R.E.M. discography. I would have loved to see this song make an appearance at the Dublin Rehearsals.

Powered by its bass line, this cover puts my amateur bass guitar skills on full view! I haven't quite got the sound right I know. On the record there appears to be some kind of "chorus" effect on the intro bass line that I'm fairly sure dies off once the other instruments begin to cover it up. I'm also not entirely pleased with the guitar solo, I find it really hard to play. But, hopefully, I think I've got the overall mood of the song right...

"Good Advices"

Good Advices is one of the songs from what I refer to as "The forgotten Side B of Fables of the Reconstruction'. I say that because I have this vision of casual fans getting to Can't Get There From Here or maybe Green Grow The Rushes and switching it off. But, in true R.E.M. style, it's the songs that don't sink in on first listen that become your favourites over time.

It was when I heard the Fables demo version of Good Advices that I started to re-appreciate the song and wanted to cover it. It's one of those jangly Peter Buck performances where the guitars shimmer beautifully leaving the bass to define the direction of the song. So well done Mike Mills, another great song!

I've only recently bought a bass guitar so I'm a bit sloppy, so bare with me. Also, I'm still at that stage where I have to leave half week intervals between playing to allow my fingers to return to their natural shape after the harsh beating they get on those thick strings!

"Ha (We Get Paid For It)"

Ha (We Get Paid For It) is an unreleased song that was played a few times during 1981 and was never officially recorded or released. My version is a cross between the live version and the slower, darker version recorded on soundcheck that same year. But the structure of the two versions are very different, one has a middle 8 the other doesn't have and vice versa. Mine has both middle 8's!

I never used to rate the song until a friend urged me to cover it and then, upon studying it, I grew to like it more and I think it could have been a contender for Chronic Town. The song features a verse guitar riff which is a precursor to the chorus guitar riff of Old Man Kensey recorded four years later.

This is my favourite of my recent batch of covers.

"Fall Above"

The song I refer to as "Fall Above" is a song that was only performed once and that was on 22nd January 1982 at Fridays, Greensboro. It was the fourth song of the set, played after Windout and before a cover of Velvet Underground's There She Goes Again.

It contains lyrical segments from Pilgrimage (speaking in tongues) and Catapult (your mother remembers this). I actually think this is one of the stronger unreleased songs from this period although it clearly doesn't match the standard of anything off Murmur. Maybe if Chronic Town hadn't been an EP it might have made it on there...

"Title"

Title, if indeed that is the name of this song and not just a name that has been latched on to by the bootleggers, is a song that was played several times during the 1987 Work Tour and a very poor audio quality demo was recorded in the early stages of the Green sessions. The song was abandoned most likely because it didn't suit the new style of Green and sounded a bit too much like the R.E.M. of old.

I don't think Stipe ever figured out proper lyrics, most the recordings feature him mumbling nonsense to form melodies. But it's a great song nevertheless and it's the first R.E.M. cover I've made for years and signals my intention to continue.

A brief explanation

For those of you who have just wandered in and have no idea what is going on, a brief explanation...

This blog is where I will be posting my R.E.M. covers as and when I complete them. But let me clarify, I don't sing, these are just instrumental backing tracks, recorded and mixed by myself using the application Garageband.

Unless I'm overcome by a sudden change of heart, you won't find covers of Man On The Moon or Shiny Happy People on here. I'm primarily interested in some of the more obscure, lesser known songs and, in some cases, unreleased songs that were maybe played live once or twice and then dropped, hence an official recording doesn't exist.

I suppose the reason for doing this is that I'd like to get some feedback on what, until now, has been a rather lonesome labour of love. I'm constantly learning and (hopefully) improving and your feedback/criticism should help me step outside my own tunnel vision and provide an objective perspective. Secondly, I hope my recordings will be of some enjoyment to hardcore R.E.M. fans. I'd like to think that, with some of the most obscure song choices, I'm providing a sample of what the song might have sounded like had the band decided to officlally record it. I'll let you be the judge of this!

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the music....