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.