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.