The four original people of R. E. M. — Mike Mills, Michael Stipe, Bill Berry and Peter Bucks — reunited and performed at the 2024 Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony. L. Busacca/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall of Fame
L. Busacca/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall of Fame
On Thursday night, Mike Mills told CBS Mornings that it would consider” a comet” for R. E. M. to get back together. But on Thursday night, R. E. M. got back up to do” Losing My Religion”, the singer’s sudden 1991 hit from Out of Time, at the Songwriters Hall of Fame training service, where the group was being honored. When the day tv program visited R. E. M.’s performance area in Athens in February, the group had been quietly planning the homecoming.
It’s been 15 times since R. E. M. performed lived, and 13 since the group broke up.
Mills stated in an interview with All Things Considered in 2011 that” the thing that makes a circle a group is the chemical that occurs between the three or four people standing on step.” That energy that occurs when Peter, Michael, and I start making noise together is what I truly may miss. You ca n’t replace that. You can only be appreciative of having it and walk on and discover something else that brings you joy and excitement.
The Athens stone group has maintained its activity. Michael Stipe has just announced a protracted piano album and two books of photography, both of which have been released recently. Mills, along with Peter Buck, plays in the The Baseball Project. Buck continues to perform in The Minus 5 and with Joseph Arthur as a solo musician. Bill Berry, who left the group in 1997 after a brain aneurysm ruptured two years prior, has largely maintained his hometown of Athens with occasional artistic output.
” There’s no drummer like Bill Berry on Earth. In an instance of” Losing My Religion,” Buck claimed in a statement to the Netflix type of Song Exploder. ” I have a bunch of musician friends, and they all ask me the same thing: ‘ What’s his mystery?’ And I ca n’t tell you, because I do n’t know. I believe that he uses the space between the large hat and the claw disc in a disco-y, disco-y manner without being overly disco.
At the Songwriters Hall of Fame training meeting, the group sheets” Losing My Religion” to its key components: Buck on guitar, Mills on 12- series acoustic piano and Berry on congas and blender. In a fan-recorded video that has been a little bit deeper since the song’s release, Stipe’s voice mingles with the murmurs of a frightened audience singing together.
R. E. M. even reunited, kind of, in February, at the 40 Watt in Athens, Ga., during Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy’s R. E. M. gift visit when the artist and singer were performing Murmur in its totality. The four initial members played a few songs with them live.
But R. E. M. insists there wo n’t be another reunion. Stipe says,” We had our day in the sun”.
