I Took Your Name

It was inevitable that I would cover this song while working on Crush With Eyeliner as it pretty much provides a musical template for I Took Your Name. 

I Took Your Name is a really easy, fun song to play. This probably explains why the band often chose it to open sets with – it's a handy warm-up song.

There isn't really much to add to this song other than to say that, despite its simplicity, I'm pleased with how my cover turned out and had real fun recording it.

Suspicion

It was listening to the studio demo of this song, on the Warner Brothers Rarities album that made me decide to cover this song. It's a little more guitar orientated and more of a "band performance" than the version that appears on Up.

But the strength of the song is in its mood and feel rather than in the music itself. The song plays out like a dream and it's the vibraphone and strings (and the heavy reverbing of these instruments) that help achieve this sleepy, semi-conscious feeling. So I found myself setting out to create a more stripped down version of the song but found myself adding the album embellishments back in as I went along.

The sound of the guitar solo is the closest approximation that I could get. For a while I wasn't convinced it was even a guitar playing this part but I guess it is, just heavily modulated and delayed. The performance of the song at The Bridge School Benefit is on YouTube and the song is played acoustically and it's quite interesting to watch Peter Buck play this solo on acoustic guitar with no effects.

This also marks the first use of my voice in a recording within this covers project! See if you can spot it!

Crush With Eyeliner

 

Monster gets mixed opinions. Some feel it's massively inferior to the two albums that preceded it, others find it an exciting change of direction. I kind of see both sides of the argument. Yes, musically it's not maintaining the dizzy heights of most of Automatic For The People but it would have been wrong for the band to create another acoustic, sombre record despite how much we would have all liked that.

Monster also sees R.E.M. becoming fashionable again and, for a while, it wasn't embarrassing as a teenager to admit to being an R.E.M. fan. Nirvana were always a bit too heavy for me but when R.E.M. went all grunge in 1994 it was certainly something I was going to take notice of. In actual fact, the term "grunge" has been wrongly associated with Monster, glam rock would have been a better description for their latest genre experiment.

Crush With Eyeliner marks the start of "the new material" as most will have already heard What's The Frequency Kenneth? on the radio by the time of the release of Monster. It also marks the introduction of the tremolo-effect guitar which was always going to be my biggest hurdle when taking on a cover of this song. It took me a while to work out that it was actually a tremolo and not delay or echo. For a while I was struggling with different echo settings but I knew it wasn't right. Then I stumbled across the "mono tremolo" setting which was a pretty close approximation of the sound on the album. The problem being I couldn't find the exact tremolo speed that would match the rhythm of the song. I do believe there is a type of tremolo that locks in to the tempo of the music. But not having access to this I had to settle for a faster tremolo which I don't think spoils it too much.

Star Me Kitten

Star Me Kitten is one of those great little forgotten R.E.M. songs that sounds nothing like anything else they've done. It features Stipe in, what I describe as, his "quiet menace" mode. It's a pre album track, a respite before the high-energy political rant of Ignoreland.

It was, and still is, my intention to reproduce the 10CC-I'm Not In Love-style voice effect for this song. I tried it with my voice and got the desired effect except that my self-loathing kicked in and I'd much rather leave it to my friend Rob who I know will sound a lot better. But to explain the process – I had to sing "aaah" in every note (and it's sharp/flat equivalent) and then load each recording on to the keys of a software instrument so I could effectively play back my voice like an instrument. I believe this is the effect Mike Mills used on the album version. You can see him working on this in the Rough Cut documentary shortly before they perform the song in soundcheck.

I didn't feel like there was a lot to do in my cover, which is a reason I've been reluctant to cover the song. In other words, to reproduce it note for note is no great feat of musicianship. But what it lacks in instrumentation it makes up for in mood and a lot of this I achieved by using a lot of reverb and light tremolo.

Make It All Okay

Here's a song I've never heard anyone say a good word about. The band have never mentioned it and, to my knowledge, have never played it live either. I'm aware lyrically it's rather bland, it doesn't push any boundaries musically and it's tempo is really really slow but I've always found it really pleasing to my ears.

The first time I heard Make It All Okay was a really poor quality recording of them practicing it in soundcheck on the 2003 tour. Straight away I really liked the chords and the sadness of the piano. I do like the album version but, and this is something I find myself saying a lot, was disappointed by the over-production and all the overdubs. My cover was an attempt at stripping it down a bit to how I originally heard the song.

One thing this song can claim is, in my opinion, the nicest closing chord of any R.E.M. song. When the piano and guitars play that F add 9 chord after Stipe sings "didn't you" the organs kick in and it's one of the loveliest ways in which they've ever ended a song.

Unfortunately thought it's emotion-laden, slow-tempo ballads like this that give R.E.M. a bad name. It's not really what they're about but it's a label that gets pinned on them a lot. If I wanted to play someone an album to say "see, R.E.M. are really cool" Around The Sun is the last thing I'd play them and yet I actually really enjoy listening to the album. It's like the band have created a guilty pleasure record just for their hardcore fans!

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.