Touring behind “Accelerate,” their most frantic, euphoric album in two decades, R.E.M. is a band recharged. Unlike the last few efforts, R.E.M.’s 14th album is meant to be played live - which makes sense considering it was partly written and arranged during five shows at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, last summer.
Affable and psyched for the road, guitarist Peter Buck got on the phone in his home in Seattle to tell us just what to expect at Friday’s show at the Comcast Center - and why the band’s previous album was like “invading Iraq.”
Herald: Most of “Accelerate” is made up of short, simple, upbeat rock songs, seemingly great songs to play live. Are there any that just aren’t working on the tour?
Buck: “Sing for the Submarine” may be the one we don’t play every day because it’s the longest and the hardest to get right. It’s the one where we’re all listening to each other but not playing with each other. We’ve all got a different part that interlocks with the others and if one person is off a little bit it sounds like the preverbal train wreck. But that’s the exception.
The songs on the new album started out long but were shortened and speeded up. Why the need to tighten “Accelerate” down to 11 songs in 34 minutes?
(Bassist) Mike (Mills) was saying on the last tour that all the songs are way better live than on the record. So he suggested we play all the songs live before we record them. In Dublin we played them for five days and it really helped. We realized which songs needed to be faster, which ones could lose a verse or chorus.
Is the tautness of the new album a direct response to what went wrong with the previous one, “Around the Sun?”
Yeah, to a certain degree. For me it was more the way that Mike and (singer) Michael (Stipe) had been guiding us to work in the studio. It drove me insane. It didn’t work on the last record and everyone realized it by the end of the recording. So my whole feeling was to be really positive, “Hey guys, we’re a great band. We can do this, but we can’t do it like that.” For me, it was a matter of focus.
And the last record didn’t have focus?
The last record was like invading Iraq. We didn’t know what we wanted to accomplish. We didn’t know what winning would be. We had no way of getting out of it once we started it. It was kind of adisaster. This record we knew what we wanted to accomplish. We’d written the songs, we’d played them live, we knew we wanted it to be really pointed and concise.
This tour is almost like a little festival. How did you decide on Modest Mouse and the National as openers?
We always pick our opening bands and we really like those bands. The only question was, is it something our fans would be into? I think it’d be great to have a free jazz band open for us, but I don’t know if anyone would like it. They’d probably say, ‘(Expletive) these guys for bringing this (expletive) here.’ With these openers we don’t all do the same thing but we still complement each other.
A lot of the press you’ve gotten lately has been along the lines of the old R.E.M. is back. Does this mean we’ll be hearing “Radio Free Europe” or other ’80s songs?
In Dublin we made a point of playing really old, obscure stuff that we never play. That was really fun, but I’m not sure how many people know that stuff. (Laughs) But we do know how to play it. We’ll have 80 or 90 songs to pick from. We’ll try to keep it so there’ll be different stuff every show. There are the four or five songs we always play at big shows, “Losing My Religion” and “Man on the Moon” and such. But if we do those and the whole new record we’ve still got an hour to play.
With such a fast, rushing record, do you worry the songs will become messy blurs in concert?
Some of them we don’t need to worry about speeding up because we just can’t play them any faster. (Laughs) But my job is to accompany the singer and the song. If I can’t get the song across because of tempo then I’m not doing my job.
