Singer joins tribute band to carry out “These Days” and “The Great Beyond” for first time since 2008
Michael Stipe made a uncommon onstage look Saturday to sing two R.E.M. tracks throughout Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy’s Brooklyn live performance.
Shannon and Narducy have been touring as a R.E.M. tribute act over the previous few years, and precise members of the Rock Hall-inducted band have sometimes joined them onstage, together with a 2024 gig in R.E.M.’s native Athens, Georgia that brought together all four core members of the group.
At a pair of 2025 gigs, in Athens and Brooklyn, Stipe joined Shannon and Narducy for a rendition of “Pretty Persuasion.” To shut out Saturday’s present at Brooklyn Steel, Stipe opted to sing two different R.E.M. cuts, Lifes Rich Pageant’s “These Days” (Shannon and Narducy’s tour is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of that 1986 album) and “The Great Beyond” from the Man on the Moon soundtrack:
The efficiency marked the primary time since 2008 that Stipe has sang each of these tracks reside.
While R.E.M. have been reluctant to have a full-fledged reunion, the group continues to have a good time their legacy in unlikely methods, together with their cameos on the Shannon and Narducy exhibits, in addition to their surprise one-off performance at the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony in June 2024.
“It would never be as good,” guitarist Peter Buck beforehand stated of a reunion, noting the band was proper to interrupt up in 2011. “At that point, there wasn’t anything we could agree on really, musically: what kind of music, how to record it, are we gonna go on tour. We could barely agree on where to go to dinner. And now we can just agree on where to go to dinner.”
