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Michael Shannon was a teenager when he first heard REM. “I was out at my cousin’s trailer; he lived in the country. He put Document on his little cassette recorder, and I sat in his room with him and listened to it. Any art I find compelling is usually because it seems singular, like the people who are making it are the only people that could be making it.”
Shannon is used to making singular art himself, as a distinctive presence in notable films for many years: Nocturnal Animals, Knives Out, The Bikeriders, The Shape of Water, Bullet Train and more. But he can also sing – in George and Tammy he played the country legend George Jones opposite Jessica Chastain as Tammy Wynette, doing all his own performances.
Not for him, though, the vanity album. Instead, Shannon has taken to the road, with a band put together by US indie-rock lifer Jason Narducy backing him as he performs REM’s back catalogue. First it was 1983 debut Murmur played in full, now it’s 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction, a show that is coming to the UK later this year. Shannon turns his face away for most of our video call, but leans in with questions about their London dates: “What neighbourhood is the Garage in? Is it near the Almeida [theatre]? I want to be there. We’re coming over to your flat before the show!”
Shannon and Narducy first met in 2014, when the musician Robbie Fulks invited them to help him perform Lou Reed’s album The Blue Mask in Chicago. The two took that ball and ran with it, playing a different classic album in that city every year – the Modern Lovers’ debut, Neil Young’s Zuma and the Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead among them.
But REM was the mother lode, and for Narducy part of why he started playing music. “They had a punk rock ethos,” he says. “They were anti-Big Rock Band, but they didn’t sound punk rock at all. So they were mysterious to me, but immediately engaging. And I think a lot of that had to do with the sadness in the music. Mike and I talk about this all the time, about how decades later, this music is still so profoundly moving.”
Shannon chips in. “And I certainly think as a lyricist, Michael Stipe is a truly unique and very effective communicator, considering that people tend to go on at length about the inscrutability of some of his lyrics. I would argue that there’s not a more efficient and direct communicator in the history of rock’n’roll frontmen.”
Playing Murmur in 2023 got them offers to gig nationwide. When they played at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, in February 2024, the whole of REM turned up; when they returned in February this year, REM didn’t just turn up, they all played with Shannon and Narducy. “It was emotional,” Narducy says. “There were people crying and screaming. You couldn’t help but get wrapped up in the emotion of it.”
Shannon is more circumspect. “Honestly, the main thing I’m thinking when [REM] come up is that I want them to enjoy being there. It’s their moment. It’s their music. It’s their house. It’s a big leap of faith for them to walk up there and do that with us.”
Narducy says that his and Shannon’s versions of REM songs “don’t sound much like REM did when they played them at the time”. Again, Shannon counters this a little: “We are very faithful to the records. The one exception is me. We’re steeped in the source material; we spend a long time studying it before we even get together in the room. Everybody takes a lot of pride in paying attention to the little details: if you listen to early bootlegs of REM live, they sound a little sparse and they’re not able to do everything on the record.”
Is it a privilege to have the status that you can get a crack backing band – with REM themselves or not – to play these songs you love, for you to sing? “Everything is a privilege,” Shannon says. “I’m just glad I’m not on a plane to El Salvador. It’s a privilege to be able to walk around freely.” But, he concedes, “the world is very dark, and the timing of this has ended up being a beautiful thing. We did our first press for this the morning after Trump had won, and we were both pretty despondent. But the tour seemed to give everybody a boost, including us. It’s wonderful to remember there’s music that can transport people to a time and place in their lives that’s separate from all the insanity.”
He must really take pleasure in singing to go out on tour doing it. “Pleasure? I don’t know. I sang when I was a boy. I was in a choir. And I’ve written some of my own music and sung that from time to time. No matter what I do, some people will appreciate it and some won’t. It’s not a numbers game for me. It’s a lot more spiritual than that.”
