R.E.M. news/Peter Buck recording with The Decemberists

R.E.M.'s Peter Buck was in Portland, OR earlier this month recording various guitar and mandolin parts with The Decemberists. REM HQ has this photo below and a few others from the session.



Buck is now in Berlin, Germany with other superhero REMers Mike Mills and Michael Stipe to record R.E.M.'s new batch of songs, reports longtime friend and manager Bertis Downs reports on the band's news site.

R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, issued about 25 years ago, gets a remastered visit in two weeks, on July 13th. It includes a second disc of rare goodies from the band, songs that REM were getting ready to record. From the band's page here, we get:

"Before going to London to record, R.E.M. huddled in Jim Hawkins’ Athens, Georgia studio for a few weeks of building new songs from fragments, including many which had emerged during soundchecks along the band’s 1984 tour.

In his liner notes, Peter Buck recalls, “The last day of rehearsal, I think with Joe Boyd in attendance, Jim Hawkins recorded what we had come up with. We spent about four hours recording all the new songs live, with minimal overdubs. I hadn't listened to this stuff since we recorded it, and I'm kind of stunned at how good it is. My memory of the rehearsals is us scrambling to finish songs. The songs on both Murmur and Reckoning had been performed for months if not years by the time they were committed to tape. I remember feeling dangerously unprepared when we flew to London, but on the evidence of this recording we must have known what we were doing.”

“The Athens Demos,” as R.E.M. has dubbed them, comprise the new edition’s second disc of 14 previously unreleased recordings, including drafts of Fables’ 11 songs and three additional tracks that didn’t make the album. The three non-album demos include two early versions of songs that were later revisited by the band and recorded for other releases and one song, “Throw Those Trolls Away,” making its release debut on this new edition."

Read more about the reissue and pre-order it at Amazon.