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.