On a chilly Thursday night in February, Michael Stipe took the stage at the 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia. Peter Buck was already there playing guitar and Stipe just wanted to sing backup on “Pretty Persuasion” with arguably the best tribute band in the world right now, featuring such R.E.M. superfans as Oscar-nominated actor Michael Shannon, veteran indie guitarist Jason Narducy and members of The Mountain Goats, Wilco and Poi Dog Pondering. “I’m no dipshit,” says Shannon. “I know people would rather watch Michael Stipe than me, so I gave him the floor. He didn’t disappoint.”
“The place went nuts!”
On a chilly Thursday night in February, Michael Stipe took the stage at the 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia. Peter Buck was already there playing guitar and Stipe just wanted to sing backup on “Pretty Persuasion” with arguably the best tribute band in the world right now, featuring such R.E.M. superfans as Oscar-nominated actor Michael Shannon, veteran indie guitarist Jason Narducy and members of The Mountain Goats, Wilco and Poi Dog Pondering. “I’m no dipshit,” says Shannon. “I know people would rather watch Michael Stipe than me, so I gave him the floor. He didn’t disappoint.”
Mike Mills jumped up to sing along, and halfway through the Reckoning track, guitarist Dag Juhlin spotted Bill Berry at the side of the stage. He motioned manically for him to get up there and Berry happily obliged. It wasn’t a reunion necessarily, but it was certainly an event. “The 40 Watt exploded,” says Narducy. “We were all looking at each other in disbelief. Everybody got choked up.”
Word spread fast around Athens and the following night the crowd at the 40 Watt was electric with anticipation. “I heard all about the festivities from the night before and I was kicking myself for missing it,” says Kevin Cregge, an R.E.M. fan and local musician. “I wondered if something might happen on Friday, but then it got pretty late into the night. I was literally settling my tab at the bar when they got up to do ‘Pretty Persuasion’. The place went nuts. When I was walking home, I felt like I was floating. Now I can say I’ve seen R.E.M.”
Thursday night might have been serendipitous, but on Friday, R.E.M. made the decision to take the stage together and play “Pretty Persuasion” one more time, with Stipe singing lead rather than backup. Part of R.E.M.’s legacy is the finality of its end, which only made this performance all the more exciting. They could find new and different ways to get the band back together. That not-quite-a-reunion has validated a project that neither Shannon nor Narducy — nor anyone else, for that matter — ever believed would be quite so momentous.
The 40 Watt shows were near the midpoint of Shannon and Narducy’s second tour playing an R.E.M. album in its entirety; in 2024, they toured Murmur and prompted all four original members to take the stage together (although they did not perform). On this recent tour, they covered 1985’s Fables Of The Reconstruction, alongside favourite tracks from 1984’s “So. Central Rain” to 1999’s “Daysleeper”. Later this year, they bring the Fables tour to the UK. In 2026, they’ll tour behind Lifes Rich Pageant.
And they’ve done it all with the blessing of R.E.M. themselves. In addition to the 40 Watt shows, Stipe joined them onstage in Brooklyn while Buck played two shows in the Pacific Northwest. “Listening to the fellows and hearing their interpretations of these songs live for the first time,” says Stipe, “one of the things that was remarkable to me was how much they studied and really did their homework, but what they’re doing is not mimicry at all. It’s not a cover band. It’s much greater than that.”
“They made sounds nobody else made”
“This whole project has been full of surprises,” says Narducy. “We never planned this thing out, and we didn’t strategise at all. People asked us to tour these R.E.M. songs, and the crowds showed up. It all comes from a place of love. We’re not trying to pretend that we’re R.E.M. We just love playing these songs. It’s sacred music.” Perhaps that — along with the band’s hearty endorsement — is why so many fans have responded so intensely to the recent tour. The musicians onstage are fans themselves, presenting the songs humbly but spiritedly.
“Every show I’ve been to, people are so joyous,” says Jen Tiernan, Associate Professor of Media and Communications at Minnesota State University, Mankato. A lifelong fan who first saw R.E.M. in 1984, she spent her sabbatical following the band on tour. “For a lot of us Gen Xers, R.E.M. were such a huge influence. We know they won’t be getting back together, so this is as close as we’re going to get.”
Shannon and Narducy have been covering R.E.M. for just a few years, but they’ve been playing other people’s music together for more than a decade. The pair met at the Hideout in Chicago back in 2014, brought together by the alt.country musician Robbie Fulks. “He had a Monday night residency there and he would play a different show every week,” says Narducy. “I sat in with him a lot. One time Robbie said he wanted to play Lou Reed’s Blue Mask and he brought in Michael as a singer. We became good friends and started going to shows and hanging out.”
After Fulks moved to Los Angeles, the new friends continued doing covers shows together, at least when they had time: Narducy was a professional touring musician with Bob Mould and his own band Split Single, while Shannon was busy filming The Shape Of Water and Knives Out. “We did The Smiths, Dylan, Neil Young, The Modern Lovers,” says Narducy.
But something clicked when they performed Murmur in its entirety. There was enough buzz among R.E.M. fans that booking agents started asking them to tour the show. When Shannon and Narducy had some downtime, they assembled a band that included Juhlin, bassist Neil Macri and Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster, playing just nine dates in early 2024. “When we did that tour, it was hard to tell what this thing was going to be,” says Narducy. “It was just rolling the dice. Are fans really interested in seeing this group of people playing their songs?”
They dug into the songs, not simply replicating the parts but putting their own stamp on the music. They’re reverent, but not stiflingly so. While the guitarists can reasonably re-create Buck’s signature jangle, Shannon doesn’t sound much Stipe; his voice is lower and grainer, bringing a terseness that matches the postpunk energy. “They made sounds nobody else made,” he says. “R.E.M. figured out how to make sounds only they could make. So these songs aren’t easy to play. There are so many sounds floating around in there. We’re trying to capture all those little gremlins.”
For Buck, watching this band perform his band’s songs can be overwhelming: “A bunch of my friends have seen the show and they all said the same thing, ‘Hey, that was really great. What do you think about it?’ I don’t think about it. I feel a strange wave going through me of that person that I used to be and the people we used to be. It was something that I felt in my bones when I heard them do those songs.”
“It’s scary as hell”
Just before they all took the stage together at the 40 Watt, Shannon, Narducy and the band members met up with R.E.M. at their Athens HQ. “We ended having a little Q&A and Mike Mills and I sat down and played some of the basslines together,” says John Stirratt, who joined when Macri was unable to tour for Fables. “I knew these songs really well, but I can’t say I knew all the bass parts. So I asked him a bunch of technical questions and he was psyched to answer them.”
Beyond appearing onstage with them, R.E.M. have offered good advices to these musicians covering their songs, mapping out guitar chords or telling the stories behind songs like “Perfect Circle” or even giving pointers on their stage presence. What R.E.M. haven’t done is dictate the performances. “I’ve never gotten the sense from R.E.M. that we’re not doing it right,” says Shannon. “They’ve never said they wished we were doing anything differently. In fact, Stipe once told me that if I ever forget a lyric, just ask the audience. They know all the words and they love to tell you. They find it endearing.”
The Fables tour culminated in a pair of shows in Chicago — a homecoming for Windy City residents Shannon and Narducy. They played Friday night at the 1,100-capacity Metro, then closed the tour at the more intimate SPACE in nearby Evanston. It was their fourth show in as many nights, and everyone was weary. “Frankly, I was a little nervous, because I didn’t know if I had another one in me,” Shannon admits. “I didn’t know if I could even sing. We were all running on fumes by then.”
Before the show, R.E.M.’s manager and longtime friend Bertis Downs stopped by and gave the ragged band a rousing pep talk. “Something just took over,” is how Shannon describes it. They ran through Fables with fresh intensity, then played multiple encores. They brought out the road crew to sing “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville”, and for “So. Central Rain”, Shannon and Narducy left the stage and wandered into the audience, harmonizing together with no microphones and only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment. At the end of the night they brought everybody up onstage — including superfan Jen Tiernan — for a rousing cover of R.E.M.’s cover of Aerosmith’s “Toys In The Attic”.
“I love all these songs,” says Shannon. “I loved them the first time I sang them, and I loved them on that final stop of the tour. I’ll love them when we do them in London. They’re canonical to me, like The Beatles or Dylan. I love doing it, but it’s scary as hell. It’s just such a big responsibility.”
Additional reporting by Anders Smith Lindall
