Second Guessing

Second Guessing used to be one of my least favourite songs on Reckoning. A lot of the things I loved about early R.E.M. songs – the obscure lyrics, the discordant chord changes – were missing from this song. I've also always found the production of this song very trebly and thin, like there is no bottom end. That said, I find this an exciting song to hear played live and I thought it sounded great at the Dublin rehearsals.

The hardest thing about covering this song was getting the guitar sound right. On the album it sounds, to me, like there are layers and layers of guitars all playing the same thing. So I went for the same approach, playing it four times and panning each one slightly differently.

I've often played this on guitar but only recently did I play along with the album version and realised just how fast it is. Fortunately there are no intricate guitar parts so I was able to record it in real time.

Romance

The first time I heard this song was on a 1982 bootleg of their Merlins, Madison show in April of that year. I instantly fell in love with the song thinking the "easy come, easy go" part was hit single material and it baffled me that the song was never included on an album. But, as time has gone on I've realised my first impressions were a bit over-the-top. There's not been another live or recorded version since that has matched it (with the possible exception of the recently leaked Murmur demos). I strongly dislike the Eponymous version, which completely zaps the song of everything I once loved about it. I consider it massively over-produced.

So my aim was to stay more true to the Murmur demo version. I actually found this song really difficult to work out on guitar and then play. The riff is easy enough although would sound so much better on a Rickenbacker, but the verse involves some awkward chord shapes that are hard to reach and it's only very recently that I figured out what is going on in the middle 8.

Working on this song has made me realise it's quite sparse, there's really not that much to it. So this, coupled with the obscure lyrics (which Stipe himself couldn't sing with a straight face at the 2007 Dublin shows!), might explain why the band abandoned it. I do think, in the hands of a more mainstream band and with more accessible lyrics, this could have been a minor 80's hit!

Hyena

I don't know why I've left it so long to cover this song. I think it's just because I've always struggled with playing this on guitar, I've followed guitar tablatures online and it's never quite sounded right. In terms of guitar style it's very much along the lines of 7 Chinese Brothers and Green Grow The Rushes but with this one it's imperative you mute the G string otherwise it sounds awful (note how Peter Buck keeps making this mistake on the 1985 Athens demo).

It's also ridiculously fast! It's not the easiest song to play anyway but at the pace of the album version it's close to impossible.

I may be wrong, but I can't recall this song ever being played live after the 1986 Pageantry tour which strikes me as odd as they played it live frequently in 1984 and 1985 before the song even made it on to an album. Maybe they just got tired of playing it.

Shaking Through

To cut a long story short this recent batch of backing tracks is born out of a desire to feature my new 12 string acoustic guitar in one of my recordings! So I racked my brain for R.E.M. songs that I hadn't already covered that feature, or would benefit from, a 12 string acoustic guitar part. Annoyingly, the main one, Swan Swan H, I had already completed a while back. 

I'm 75% sure that Shaking Through uses a 12 string acoustic guitar, either that or it's Peter Buck's 12 string Rickenbacker but with very little amplification. Either way I saw an opportunity! I also like the way the two lead instruments, guitar and piano are panned far left and far right leaving plenty of room for the bass guitar in the middle. Putting together the piano part was quite laborious but I think I've got it pretty close.

The 12 string acoustic being a clunky instrument to play I'll admit to recording the guitar part at a slower speed and then speeding it up afterwards. That riff in the first verse and at the end of the middle 8 is played way too fast for me to perform it in real time. Stuff like this further discredits Peter Buck's claim that he wasn't very competent on guitar when they first started out.

Time After Time

Though I suspect Time After Time is often regarded as one of the weaker songs on Reckoning I have always had a soft spot for this song from the moment I first heard it. I always liked it when R.E.M. slowed things down in their early days and, while this is nowhere near as strong as Perfect Circle, I do think it's a lovely song and a nice sonic departure from the rest of the songs on side 1 of Reckoning.

This was always going to be quite a complex song to put together and yet I was determined to get it right. From the way the tribal drums are panned right to the way the ringing guitars fluctuate in volume sporadically throughout the song I wanted to pay attention to these little details. I learnt early on that the song is played with a capo on the first fret which explains why I could never play along with the CD previously (incidentally Harborcoat is also performed in a different key on the album version).

The only thing I'm still not happy about is the loud acoustic strum that introduces the song and then repeats throughout the verses. I did this on a 12 string acoustic but on the album it sounds far more eastern-sounding. 

Finest Worksong

Though Finest Worksong might not be one of my favourite R.E.M. songs it's potentially my favourite album opener. If Document is about the work ethic then Finest Worksong, and it's accompanying video, is the perfect robust start. What it lacks in hooks it makes up for in power and attitude, from the booming drums to the scratchy, industrial-sounding guitar.

I won't lie, I stole the drums from a source I found online, though it took a bit of work to get them sounding the same as on the album. The guitar and bass parts weren't complicated it just took some work getting them to sound right, for example the harmonics at the end, the slide guitar parts and that lovely second bass guitar part right at the end. There is also a really interesting strummed bass part in the middle 8 which you can barely hear on the original.

Devil Rides Backwards

On the eve of the 25th anniversary release of Automatic For The People I decided to upload my instrumental cover of, what is probably, my favourite unreleased R.E.M. song.

It's a song that was no doubt left off the album either because it was "too R.E.M." or, in the same way Fascinating was left off Reveal because the album didn't need another slow song, because Automatic For The People was already too sombre without another slow, minor key song. But presumably that, and the fact Stipe struggled to complete a lyric, was the only reason this gem remained a secret until recent weeks.

In terms of its composition it's R.E.M. by numbers, an acoustic driven song with a lively bass and organs brought in to add that extra element of impending doom and Stipe's crooning, half-finished vocals showing off a singer at the height of his vocal magnetism.

It is with love and adoration for their music that I present this cover which closely follows the demo version. Happy AFTP25!..

Electrolite

Electrolite was a song I had thought I was getting tired of or had heard too much. I think because the band had played it relentlessly live since its release I had grown tired of hearing it. But through covering the song I have learnt to appreciate it again, it is one of the standout tracks on New Adventures In Hi Fi and lets not forget the final song on a Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe album.

When it was suggested I cover Electrolite I was a little sceptical with it being a piano driven song and my forte has always been guitar. Plus I've always loved the banjo in this song and felt its absence might be a problem. But it had never occurred to me to play the banjo part on mandolin instead. The arrangement is pretty much faithful to the original, even including the lovely violin part in the middle 8 although I feel the outcome is that my version sounds more bright and cheery than the original. No bad thing of course, plus I'm fairly happy with this, especially as I've been out of the game for a few months!

Body Count

I consider Body Count to be one of the more mature unreleased songs to emerge from the band's very early days. Partly in that it's the first song they wrote with a topical subject matter (though it is a rather cringe-worthy attempt at a song about the Vietnam War!). Also, in the structure of the song which is quite ambitious for the band at the time. It is essentially two songs with fairly similar melodies joined together by a sonic splurge of feedback and freeform noise in the middle of the song.

But it was an early favourite of mine when I first got my hands on some early R.E.M. bootlegs and it stood out from other early songs. It's more of a hint at what R.E.M. would become than other songs like Baby I and Dangerous Times. R.E.M. would of course adopt a much more subtle, effective approach to topical songs in years to come, Body Count stands as a rather immature first attempt.

In terms of my approach to the song, I found the best quality version I could on YouTube and used this as a template. I'm aware there are versions out there without the second half of the song but I particularly wanted to feature the whole song. I improvised with the bass as I couldn't clearly work out what Mike was doing most the time. I added guitar overdubs during the second half of the song too.

Electron Blue

With Electron Blue I've done a full on cover of the live version of the song. The album version is far too "spacey" for my liking. And, since I was going for a more raw sound with this, I had some fun adding layers of experimental guitar noises and feedback. I actually use a kitchen knife on the guitar strings at one point to achieve the sound I'm after.

Electron Blue was one of those songs I wasn't keen on when I first bought Around The Sun but it has grown on me over the years and I now consider it to be one of the more successful of their genre-experiment songs.

Aftermath

Aftermath may well be the most boring song R.E.M. have ever wrote, with lyrics that fall into Stipe's "pep-talk" category and a video that the band should be ashamed of! Instrumentally, the drums are so uninspiring, it would be interesting to know what Bill Berry might have done differently to give the song more life, that's assuming Bill would have allowed the song to make it on to an album in the first place. Even Mike Mills can't come to the rescue this time with an interesting bass line.

I was as bored covering this as I am listening to it so I wanted to make it a bit more guitar-orientated than the piano/organ dirge on Around The Sun. I also brought in the mandolin, mainly just for the hell of it. The result isn't that bad, I think, considering what I was given to work with...

Boy In The Well

Another example of a song that is actually rather good but because it exists on an album surrounded by other slow-tempo ballads it comes across a bit bland and uninspiring. But, like a lot of songs on Around The Sun, Boy In The Well is rescued by the rich, emotion-laden quality of Stipe's voice.

As is often the case with my covers I aim to strike a balance between the album and live version. In this case, the live version is from the 2005 Dublin performance from the R.E.M. Live CD/DVD. The band have often commented that the songs from Around The Sun subsequently worked better live which is often true but there is a beauty about the album version that is lost when played live. 

In attempting to mix and match the best parts for my cover the most obvious thing is the electric guitar during the verses which is as per the live version. To my knowledge the band only played this song once acoustically and that was for the album recording. I've kept the strings and electric piano parts from the album version as they sound particularly nice in the intro and verses. I've gone for a more feedback-driven electric guitar sound for the choruses and middle 8 which, again, is based on the way they played the song live. Finally, I've added a mandolin to the choruses just to fill the sound out.

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.

New Test Leper

Having fallen in love with the acoustic version of this song, which was issued as a B-side of the Bittersweet Me single, I recall being a bit disappointed with how different the album version was when it came out. But I can see why the band did it that way. I often prefer stripped down versions of songs, I was the same with The Lifting and Beat A Drum, but for New Test Leper to appear on New Adventures In Hi Fi in its acoustic format would have left the song feeling out of place on a mostly electric album. Plus, if the album version had never seen the light of day no one would ever have heard Mike Mills’s bass line! I often praise Mike Mills for his bass lines but often it’s not until you really start to study the songs that you learn how impressive some of the more subtle aspects of the songs are. The bass parts on this, in particular the verse, dance all over the place, it’s like he’s playing a different song to what Peter is playing on rhythm guitar. It was real fun to work out and to play.

Despite my love for the acoustic version, my cover is pretty much a direct reproduction of the album version, mainly because this made it more of an interesting project. I suppose the only outside influence is the way I treat the guitars is more inspired by the way they tended to play this live. On the album the electric guitar is really distorted and yet live it’s a lot more jangly.

Incidentally the chorus riff I play on guitar, even though I have my suspicions that it’s actually played on an organ. I may be wrong but I just don’t know how you’d get a guitar to sound like that.

Near Wild Heaven

If Near Wild Heaven is to be thrown in with Stand and Shiny Happy People as one of the band's bubblegum pop songs then it may be my favourite in the category, certainly at the moment. No song makes me smile when it comes on the radio more than Near Wild Heaven, it’s instantly recognised as an R.E.M. song with its double tracked Rickenbacker guitar riff that weaves in and around the beat in Peter Buck’s signature style and gorgeous Beach Boys-style vocal harmonies.

One of two Mike Mills solo vocals on Out Of Time. But where Texarkana is purely Mike Mills for the most part Near Wild Heaven is predominantly a duel vocal between Mills and Stipe. This I think helps rescue the vocal as, let’s be honest, one gets the impression Mike Mills isn’t a naturally gifted singer. I remember watching Mike sing a piano rendition of Don’t Go Back To Rockville on VH1 Storytellers and it really wasn’t great!

My incentive to cover the song was my love for the guitar riff and determination to learn it and play it just right. In covering the song I discovered the bass parts are really interesting too. I added an acoustic guitar doing the same as the electric just to bring out the definition of the notes.