Thanks to the person who posted this on the Dylan newsgroup.

D

March 30, 2008
Music
R.E.M. Tries Picking Up the Pace
By ALAN LIGHT

ATHENS, Ga.

ON the ground floor of a nondescript building, a few blocks from the
University of Georgia campus here, sits a little room stuffed with
instruments and decorated with Christmas lights, lava lamps, old
concert posters and tacked-up 45s. R.E.M. started rehearsing in this
space in 1985, and it looks as if nothing has changed.

This is a place to work not hang out, and work is what Michael Stipe,
Peter Buck and Mike Mills were doing on this March afternoon, blasting
through 13 songs over the course of a few hours. It was their first
day of rehearsal for the shows that would introduce their hard-
charging new album, "Accelerate" (Warner Brothers), and they weren't
exactly easing back onstage: later in the week they were headliners at
the Langerado festival in Florida, followed by a date at South by
Southwest in Austin, Tex.

"We never do much rehearsal," Mr. Buck, 51, the band's guitarist, said
over a ginger ale later at a dark, empty bar around the corner.
"Sometimes having that little edge of not feeling comfortable with the
songs gives it a little bit of energy. Terror will do that."

Despite spending 28 years together, at this moment a touch of fear is
understandable for the trio. (The fourth member, the drummer, Bill
Berry, left the band in 1997, following a brain aneurysm.) From its
debut in 1981 until the mid-1990s R.E.M. was a definitive American
rock band, but its sales and influence have steadily declined in the
last decade. "Accelerate" is a very deliberate response to an internal
crisis that Mr. Stipe, the group's singer, described as major, and
that they all agreed almost broke up the band.

Its last album, the hazy, somber "Around the Sun" (2004), took nine
months to make and satisfied neither the musicians nor their fans. It
didn't crack Billboard's Top 10 and sold less than 250,000 copies. The
band members realized they needed to find a new way to work together
or quit, coming to the end of a road that took them from this out-of-
the-way college town to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"If you're a music fan who has 15 artists you follow, and one of them
kind of takes a nose dive -- well, that's disappointing, but you'll
move on," Mr. Stipe said. "But to us this is everything that we do."

Mr. Buck said he had few commercial expectations and was much more
concerned about making fans believe in the band again. "Whatever we
did on the last record didn't work," he said. "I wasn't happy with it,
and I don't think anyone else was. Michael tends to think that the
longer you work on something, the better it can be. But it doesn't
work that way for us. It just kept getting weirder and weirder and
worse."

"Around the Sun" came after other R.E.M. albums -- "Up" (1998) and
"Reveal" (2001) -- that also received lukewarm receptions and were more
atmospheric and keyboard based than the music that established the
group. The band had fallen from its place as one of the biggest acts
in the world to being unable to reach gold-record status. This
downturn followed a record-breaking $80 million contract the band
signed with Warner Brothers in 1996, a move that recently made Blender
magazine's list of the "20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All
Time."

Mr. Stipe said the turmoil started as soon as Mr. Berry left the band.
"Any 5-year-old can figure out that with four people, you can have two
very clear sides, but with three people, one person is always left
out," he said, picking at his lunch in the front room of the rehearsal
space. Soft-spoken and inquisitive, Mr. Stipe, 48, was nursing a shin
injury from a recent go-kart accident, and a sore jaw where he had a
wisdom tooth removed. "The simple mathematics are that someone was
always being ganged up on by the other two."

Driving around Athens at nightfall Mr. Mills, 49, the group's bass
player and keyboardist, agreed. "Communication had broken down, and it
had gotten repaired, and then it broke down again," he said. "And then
we said: 'O.K., this can't go on. Either we're done, or we've got to
refocus ourselves in some way.' "

After the tour that followed "Around the Sun" the band members
gathered to determine their future. "I said, 'Guys, I'm too old to
spend nine months doing something I don't want to do, making work I'm
not proud of,' " Mr. Buck said. "We should try something different, or
else you can do it without me."

Mr. Stipe said: "It was a very important moment for us. We decided to
do something that was really raw, immediate, unrehearsed -- basically,
gut and instinctual. And we chose the most obvious thing, which is to
write really fast songs and record them in a really fast way."

The aptly titled "Accelerate" is an album that should please R.E.M.'s
old fans. Recorded in a matter of weeks rather than months, with 11
songs totaling less than 35 minutes, it's a steady blast of short,
sharp rockers, a breathless tumble of hooks and harmonies. The album
is reminiscent of R.E.M. favorites like "Lifes Rich Pageant" and
"Document," from the mid-1980s era when the band managed the Olympian
feat of being both cool and popular, but it avoids the feel of
nostalgia.

"Another mistake would have been to try to do exactly what we used to
do back in 1985 or '86," Mr. Buck said. "Back then we actually didn't
record as live as this one is."

Mr. Stipe's signature obscure lyrics are more focused and penetrating
on "Accelerate." In conversation Mr. Stipe, who has devoted as much
attention to activism as to performing in recent years, retained his
mysterious aura, veering from pragmatic political analysis to
elaborate science-fiction metaphors and offhanded remarks about his
depressions and insecurities. (He can also be pretty funny. When
recent comments he made to Spin magazine about his life as an out gay
man were widely discussed in the news media, he responded with a video
statement on People.com, announcing that his band mates were finally
coming out as heterosexuals.)

As always, his personality spills into the lyrics, which alternate
between lamenting the state of American leadership ("The business-
first flat earthers licking their wounds/The verdict is dire, the
country's in ruins") and exploring the evocative visions, taken
directly from his dreams, that have long informed his writing.

R.E.M. is even promoting "Accelerate" with the energy of a young band,
using strategies like posting a series of 90 one-minute video clips on
the group's Web site, remhq.com. The official premiere of "Accelerate"
will take place on Facebook.

"R.E.M. have been pretty savvy about the new music distribution
model," said Scott Lapatine, founder and editor in chief of the music
blog Stereogum.com. (Last year Stereogum assembled a tribute album
commemorating the 15th anniversary of R.E.M.'s "Automatic for the
People.")

Mr. Buck bristles a bit that "Accelerate" is being widely greeted as a
comeback album. "I don't feel like this is a return to form so much as
this is the level we work at generally," he said. "Of the 14 records
we've made, I think 12 of them are pretty close to this."

A return to R.E.M.'s classic sound may not be enough to attract new
listeners. Aaron Axelsen, music director of Live 105 in San Francisco,
said his station played "Supernatural Superserious," the first single
from "Accelerate," about 50 times before dropping it from rotation. He
described the reaction it received as "polarizing" for his modern rock
audience. "We were hoping it would bridge the gap to our younger,
alternative listeners, but to a lot of them R.E.M. is their dad's
band."

Much has changed in R.E.M.'s world since the members came together as
college kids in the early '80s, but a visit to Athens illustrates how
much has stayed the same. The Wuxtry record shop, where Mr. Buck, then
the store manager, first met Mr. Stipe is still open; after rehearsal
Mr. Buck swings by and flips through the new releases. Mr. Mills lives
in the house he bought in 1986. (Mr. Stipe keeps a house in Athens but
lives mostly in New York; Mr. Buck moved to Seattle in the mid-'90s.)
A steeple is the last vestige of the church where the band played its
first show.

In 1981 R.E.M.'s debut single, "Radio Free Europe," was released on
the tiny local Hib-Tone label, but its impact was far-reaching.
R.E.M., with its mix of punk energy and folk lyricism, fronted by the
enigmatic, sometimes indecipherable vocals of Mr. Stipe, became the
flagship band of the emerging "college radio" market in the first half
of the '80s. As the group honed more of a pure rock sound, its members
grew from cult heroes to arena headliners.

The 1991 release "Out of Time," which featured the acoustic-based
smash single "Losing My Religion," sold four million copies, and
established R.E.M.'s members as global superstars. Critics loved the
next few albums too, but as the band experimented with different
sounds, and rock lost ground to hip-hop and boy bands, R.E.M.'s fan
base started to show cracks, even before Mr. Berry's departure.

In separate conversations each band member brought up U2 as a
comparison. In the '80s and '90s the two groups seemed joined at the
hip, conquering the pop world while remaining true to their
principles, blazing a trail for the alternative movement that came in
their wake. The bands remain friendly, but somewhere along the way
R.E.M. ceded the spotlight while U2 remained a stadium act.

"We've been the biggest band in the world, and it was great, but it's
not a career goal for us," Mr. Mills said. "U2 are more able to handle
that sort of thing. They are made up to do that, and we're not, and
thank goodness."

In the years since R.E.M.'s breakthrough, Mr. Stipe has often served
as a mentor to younger rockers. "I don't like being the advice guy,
but it is part of who I am," he said. "Be it Kurt Cobain or Conor
Oberst or Chris Martin or Thom Yorke, there is a little club of people
who do this weird thing as a job. I've just done it longer, so I can
tell them to expect to go into a depression after a tour, or that
acupuncture isn't a bad thing."

A band dinner revealed some of the new Athens, where there is now a
choice between several upscale restaurants, as well as the evolution
of the band's interaction. The leisurely meal confirmed that R.E.M. is
made up of three men with very different interests. Mr. Buck compared
record producers, Mr. Mills discussed his beloved Atlanta Braves, and
Mr. Stipe talked politics and "Ugly Betty." While they passed plates
of food and laughed about disastrous travel experiences, though, it
felt like the unity that propels "Accelerate" isn't something they
left in the recording studio.

"It's like having blood relatives," Mr. Buck said. "Twenty-eight years
is a long time."

Mr. Stipe said: "We've been through some dark times together. But
there's a humor, there's a camaraderie, there's an absurdity to the
daily ins and outs of what life can throw at you and how well you deal
with it. And we happen to be in a very good place right now."