R.E.M. has offered up the latest taste of its upcoming multi-disc 25th anniversary reissue of Automatic For the People in the form of a demo of the song “Photograph,” an AFTP-era track that, in its completed version, would feature a duet between Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant and appear on 1993’s Born to Choose.
A second previously unreleased demo of an unheard song from R.E.M.’s sessions for its 1992 classic Automatic for the People has been released ahead of that album’s reissue next month, a song called “Devil Rides Backwards” that’s being billed as the album’s “great lost track.”
Six years after the breakup of R.E.M., frontman Michael Stipe will debut his first-ever solo composition — a score made using Moog synthesizer gear — as part of an exclusive audiovisual installation he’s creating for Moogfest in Durham, N.C., this May. Tickets for Moogfest are on sale now.
Just weeks after revealing “I think I will sing again” in a TV interview, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe took to the stage Monday night in New York City as the unannounced opening act for Patti Smith at Webster Hall, performing a six-song set that included two numbers by his old band and four covers.
R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe appeared on “CBS This Morning” today to help promote the band’s recently released “REMTV” DVD box set, discussing the band’s history and his own future and the (un)likelihood that we’ll ever see an R.E.M. reunion (“That will never happen. There’s no point.”).
Former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe inducted Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last night at a massive ceremony at the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, declaring of the genre-shaping alt rock act that, “This is not just pop music. This is something much greater than that.”
There very well could have been a full-fledged R.E.M. reunion in Portland, Ore., on Saturday night as all four members of the defunct college-rock superstars performed after Peter Buck’s wedding. But, by all appearances, they managed to avoid such headlines, just barely, by not actually sharing the stage together.
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