Michael Shannon’s Latest Role: Touring in an R.E.M. Cover Band

If you ask him, Michael Shannon will tell you he doesn’t entirely approve of the turn his career has taken. At the age of 50, the prolific actor, twice nominated for an Academy Award, finds himself the singer in an R.E.M. cover band. And loving every minute of it, much to his dismay.

On February 14, Shannon will begin his second tour inside of a year devoted to R.E.M. It will take him to more than a dozen cities in the US. Interest in the shows has been so high, with some tickets for a stop in Athens, Georgia, on the secondary market going for north of $600, that dates have been added in England as well. Yet on the eve of the tour, Shannon sounds almost wistful. “One of my least favorite things on Earth,” he tells me, “is actors who have bands. So I’m joining a club I wouldn’t want to be a member of, as Woody Allen [quoting Groucho Marx] would say.”

What makes the project more than just a vanity gig, or some A-lister’s whim, is the depth of seriousness Shannon brings to it, as well as the quality of musicians behind him. The band is led by Jason Narducy, a versatile singer and guitarist from the Chicago suburb of Evanston who has played in groups like Superchunk and with Bob Mould. Joining him are a host of other accomplished musical artists, such as John Stirratt of Wilco, on bass, and Jon Wurster, who once recorded with R.E.M., on drums.

“To a songwriter, to have someone interpret your work is the greatest possible compliment. To take it on tour? That’s fucking balls.”

With Shannon’s brooding intensity and unexpectedly powerful vocals at the center, the group offers vivid recreations of the early songs of R.E.M., from the time before “Losing My Religion” or “Everybody Hurts,” when the band was the underground darling of college radio. The performances can be mesmerizing, not only to those of us who consider ourselves longstanding, diehard enthusiasts of R.E.M., but to those who were actually in the original band itself.

“To a songwriter,” Michael Stipe, the singer for R.E.M., tells me, “to have someone interpret your work is the greatest possible compliment. To go into a studio and cover a song, okay, that’s incredibly flattering, and it’s not altogether difficult. There’s a little bit of wizardry and magic that happens in a studio, and anyone can make something sound good. To take it on tour? That’s fucking balls.”

Stipe was on hand last year when Shannon and Narducy stopped at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, R.E.M.’s hometown. He was not alone: The other members of the quartet, Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills, were also in attendance. I watched the performance from a spot near the front of the stage, next to the soundboard, and I can tell you it felt less like a concert than a revival, a gathering of the faithful. Some of this had to do with the location: Few names are as significant in R.E.M. lore as the 40 Watt, a club the band has been playing at since the spring of 1980. It was also because none of us could be sure that what we were witnessing would happen again. Berry had left the group in 1997, and the other members of R.E.M. called it quits in 2011. This was the first time the four of them had appeared together in public in more than a decade.

Throughout the evening, Berry, Buck, and Mills came onstage to join Shannon and Narducy on songs like “Perfect Circle” and “Pretty Persuasion.” “They’re better than we were,” Mills joked, but sounded like he meant it, relishing our outrage at such a heresy. After playing the whole of Murmur, R.E.M.’s 1983 debut record, Shannon and Narducy went through more than a dozen other songs. At one point, I glanced over and caught the chief of the 40 Watt’s security detail closing his eyes and mouthing the words to “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars),” an obscure track off Chronic Town, the EP R.E.M. released before Murmur.

For nearly three hours it went on like this: Awash in a state of jubilant disbelief, we all seemed to recognize that this was the closest we might come to the R.E.M. reunion that its members have long assured us will never take place. Yet what was most moving was watching them share in our collective astonishment. It was as if they, too, had been transported back to 1983. “It’s so crazy,” Stipe confides, “that I was there in the 40 Watt when I realized: Holy fucking shit, I’ve never heard these before. I was always at the center of it”—unable, in other words, to step back and listen to a song as it was being performed. “I had never heard, what is it, ‘9-9?’ What a crazy fucking song.”

Shannon insists he’s not playing a role. “I’m not Michael Stipe,” he says, “and that’s okay.”

What Shannon and Narducy did that night far outstripped their original intentions. There was never any plan for a tour; it evolved by accident. The two have been playing together for more than a decade, usually one show per year, devoted to a single album. As Narducy explains, “What would happen is, Mike would call me and say, ‘Hey, I’m coming to town, is there any way we can we do a show?’”

In years past they have covered works like Highway 61 Revisited and Scary Monsters and Lou Reed’s The Blue Mask. In 2023, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Murmur, Shannon and Narducy decided to perform the album at the Metro in Chicago. When it was over, they received calls from promoters and clubs across the country, asking if they would take the show on the road.

“I had never done a tour before,” Shannon says. “I had only done one-off gigs. I was kind of nervous about it, but it was short enough—nine dates—and I thought, Let’s go ahead and cross it off the bucket list.”

It can be tempting to view these shows as an extension of Shannon’s other music-based work, such as his role in the recent Joshua Oppenheimer musical The End. Over the years he’s played his share of singers with outsize and charismatic personalities, starring in the film Elvis & Nixon and in the Showtime series George & Tammy, where Shannon, as George Jones, did all of his own singing.

the cover of one of its issues. Since then, they’ve run into each other a handful of times in New York, and the relationship has thrived on a foundation of mutual admiration.

Shannon, who first heard R.E.M. around the age of 13, when his cousin put on a cassette of the 1987 release Document—“I was like, What did I just hear? How is that even possible?”—is enough of a fan to know that trying to impersonate Stipe is a zero-sum game. He doesn’t have the range, for one thing. Shannon’s baritone resides several notes below the upper limits of Stipe’s register. “He’s a phenomenal singer, there is no doubt about it,” Shannon reflects. “He doesn’t necessarily present as a powerful figure. He’s kind of slight in stature and build, but the voice behind all that is undeniably powerful.”

There may be times when, leaping and ducking his head in front of the microphone, Shannon seems to be channeling Stipe’s elusive, captivating stage presence from the 1980s, when the singer for R.E.M. might do anything from shake and twist in a hypnotic freeform to turn his back on the audience. Mostly, though, Shannon’s approach is different. Clutching the mic with both hands, eyes often closed, he gives a picture of great concentration and stillness. He doesn’t interact with the crowd, or even with Narducy and the band, all that much. The effect, in the end, is one of approximation rather than likeness: an attempt not to duplicate the experience of seeing R.E.M. live, but to recover, more generally, the novelty and dynamism of the group in their earliest incarnation.

Some elements of the show, for this reason, are deliberately unpracticed. Since the band is assembled specifically for the occasion, “it’s like a pop-up project,” Narducy says, or “a small theater company. You learn the script, you run through it once, and then you perform it.” Buried in each show is a wealth of R.E.M. arcana—Narducy says he plays a Fender Telecaster because that’s what Peter Buck had at R.E.M.’s first-ever gig, and Wurster will don a bolo tie and vest in homage to the preferred stage dress of Bill Berry. “But we’re not a tribute band,” Narducy emphasizes, meaning they do not try to give exact transcriptions of the music. “It’s a group of indie-rock veterans doing their version of these songs that we love so much.”

This tour will last more than twice as long as the one in 2024, and stop at larger venues, like the Fillmore in San Francisco and the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC. Though the set will vary from night to night, with some of the songs having never been rehearsed before sound check, each show will begin with a sequential run-through of Fables of the Reconstruction, R.E.M.’s third album, released 40 years ago this June. It was made at a time when Stipe was trying to reinvent himself as a lyricist.

“Murmur was really just a bunch of sounds and words that don’t necessarily make sense,” he says, “but are driven together, the William Burroughs–Brion Gysin cutup applied to pop songwriting. Fables of the Reconstruction has actual narrative arcs within each song.”

Still, it was something of a miracle that Stipe managed to write anything during this period, considering he was in the midst of what he now describes as a debilitating depression. Four decades ago, R.E.M. may have been beloved by critics and indie stalwarts (Rolling Stone, in 1983, chose Murmur as its album of the year—over Thriller), yet they were still penniless, and largely anonymous outside the streets of Athens. By the winter of 1984, Stipe was worn down from years of constant touring and recording. And in the weeks before recording Fables, he told me, he consumed nothing except coffee and bananas, and was terrified of a terminal virus for which there was, as yet, no fixed name.

“People I knew, and people I had slept with, were just starting to drop off, and there was no way to test for it,” he remembers. “I was starved, completely adrenalized from being onstage and doing my job there, and then there was an undercurrent of fear from what came to be known as HIV/AIDS. I was just exhausted. The place where I was living had no heat, there was a giant hole in the floor, I was freezing, and I was putting together this record and had three weeks to finish it. I was completely cuckoo and on my way to a nervous breakdown.”

“It is hardly a stretch to say that there may be no more important American songwriting collective of the past 50 years.”

Somehow, he was able to finish it, and after demoing the songs in Athens, R.E.M. flew to England to record with the producer Joe Boyd, whose previous collaborations included albums with Nick Drake and Richard Thompson.

Revisiting the songs of Fables today, one might be surprised at how little they betray of Stipe’s breakdown. Some do have a visionary or hallucinatory edge—“peel back the mountains, peel back the sky,” Stipe intones in the opener, “Feeling Gravitys Pull”—but there are also ballads like “Driver 8” and “Wendell Gee,” those narrative songs Stipe mentioned, as well as up-tempo tracks such as “Can’t Get There From Here,” which Shannon calls “a blast of adrenaline and joy.” As Shannon went over the track list, he paused, and with a laugh took stock of the hopelessness conveyed by such a title. “I feel that way about a lot of the songs on the record. They somehow capture a sense of whimsy and despair at the same time, which is quite a trick.”

Shannon knows that presenting this material will be a challenge. Last year, when touring Murmur, he could always write it off as an unscripted, informal, almost guerilla affair. Not this time. What happened at the 40 Watt is the stuff of legend, and now Shannon and Narducy will have to meet the weight of expectation. Shannon has spent the last few weeks cramming, poring over R.E.M. shows on YouTube and visiting Ron Browning, a Nashville-based voice coach who previously helped him prepare for the role of George Jones.

Certainly, it helps that those whose reaction they might once have feared have been so supportive. “You guys nailed it,” read a text sent by Mike Mills after the group performed “Driver 8” on The Tonight Show last month.

From the Archive: R.E.M.’s Solar PowerArrow

To be sure, it isn’t every band that would want this type of revue to succeed. But then, the members of R.E.M. have always been contrarians. So much of the group’s vitality can be traced to how determined they are to be unlike other acts. While a case can be made that they are the last band band—in an era of single-personality artists—it is hardly a stretch to say that there may be no more important American songwriting collective of the past 50 years. Yet R.E.M. is careful to maintain a measure of distance between itself and its achievement. Besides the refusal to cash in on a reunion, their slate of archival releases is minimal, and you won’t see a documentary or biopic of the group anytime soon. Not that they wish to disown their body of work; they have simply decided the backward glance, the job of tending to their legacy, is something best left to others.

“We always said as soon as a song is released it no longer belongs to us,” is how Stipe puts it. “Nothing lasts forever, so if these guys want to pick up one of these records that a lot of people maybe have never even heard, or heard one or two songs off of, and perform it live, it feels really good.”

And when the tour is over, what then? Narducy wouldn’t dismiss the possibility it could become an annual rite. “Why not?” he says, thinking ahead to 2026, and 40 years since Lifes Rich Pageant, the R.E.M. release that features two songs, “I Believe” and “These Days,” whose lyrics Stipe wrote after coming through the crisis of his breakdown.

Watching Shannon interpret R.E.M., meanwhile, and hearing of the lengths to which he has gone to get ready for these shows, one might wonder whether a larger pivot is in the works. Last December, he even went so far as to say, “I frankly prefer music to film,” though when pressed on the question now, he admits he won’t be abandoning his regular profession anytime soon. “I can’t see myself quitting acting entirely and becoming a musician.” He might sport a certain ambivalence, since it means belonging to that club he would rather not be part of, but in the end Shannon can’t help himself. He is compelled to celebrate these albums. “It doesn’t seem old,” Shannon says of R.E.M. and their songs. “It doesn’t make me feel nostalgic, it’s not a throwback. The music feels as urgent now as the first time I heard it.”

Benjamin Hedin is a writer and an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. He is the author, most recently, of the novel Under the Spell, and is currently at work on a biography of Alice Munro.