Nice article in January's Q Magazine about the new album. I cut & pasted the article from a PDF file:
Summer 2010 found R.E.M. ensconced in Hansa
Studios, Berlin – the legendary recording
location where David Bowie made his landmark
“Heroes” album in 1977 and U2 reinvented
themselves at the dawn of the ’90s with Achtung
Baby – working on their 15th studio album, due April 2011
and entitled, as enigmatically as ever, Collapse Into Now.
“Great records were made there and I’m sure horrible
records were made there, too,” laughs guitarist Peter Buck,
“but you think about the good ones.”
Following on from their career-reinvigorating 2008 album
Accelerate, which saw R.E.M. return to first principles with
a set of vital, pared-down, uptempo rock songs, the trio found
themselves keen to stretch their sonic range again for its
follow-up. “With Accelerate, we wanted to make a statement,”
says Mike Mills. “With this record, there were no rules.”
In Berlin, Buck and Mills managed to resist the pull of the
city’s nightlife (although the latter admits he dined out nightly
on “wurst of every kind”), while their more socially-active
frontman Michael Stipe – currently in one of his habitual
“non-interview modes” – tended to hit the bars and clubs post-
sessions. During these nocturnal wanderings Stipe hung out
with electro artist and city resident Peaches and went to see
Pearl Jam, roping in the former to contribute guest vocals
on propulsive rocker Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter,
while the latter’s frontman, Eddie Vedder, can be heard on the
driving It Happened Today.
Preliminary sessions for Collapse Into Now began in
November 2009 at The Music Shed in New Orleans. For Buck,
who visited the city only five months after Hurricane Katrina
hit in 2005, it was reassuring to discover that the place had
reclaimed its unique atmosphere.
“Five months after, it was a ghost town,” he recalls. “You’d
hear gunshots at night. After six at night, the front door of
the hotel would be locked and guarded by a guy with a gun.
This time, it’s really come back. The music scene is really
happening. It still has the same vibe.”
R.E.M. captured the local musical flavour in Oh My Heart,
a ballad with a New Orleans funeral march feel that recalls the
Eastern European-tinged indie folk of Beirut. For the track
Stipe conjured up a lyric that follows on from Accelerate’s
Houston, with its central character relocated this time to
the Louisiana city. Elsewhere, opener Discoverer sounds
like a great lost out-take from Green, while All The Best is,
as Mills puts it, a “balls-to-the-wall rocker” that bears all the
hallmarks of a classic R.E.M. single.
One after-hours party in New Orleans, meanwhile, which
found a refreshed Stipe and Mills return to the latter’s room
with a group of friends and set to work using the in-suite piano,
resulted in moody mid-pacer Walk It Back, subsequently
nailed in one take the following morning. “We listened back
to it a week later,” Buck explains, “and we said, It’s kind of
fucked-up in a whole lot of ways, but we couldn’t better it.”
Final overdubs and mixing for the record, once again
helmed by Accelerate co-producer Jacknife Lee, took place at
Blackbird Studios in Nashville, the city being an old haunt of
R.E.M.’s since the early ’80s. During these sessions, punk icon
and former R.E.M. collaborator Patti Smith flew down from
New York to add her voice to brooding closer Blue, the final
words of which lend the album its title.
“Naming the thing is always the hardest,” says Buck. “Patti
was looking at the lyric sheet and she said, How about Collapse
Into Now? So Patti named it and you’ve gotta go with what
Patti says.”
Ask the pair where they feel Collapse Into Now fits into
the R.E.M. catalogue and it’s immediately clear that they are
buzzing on the finished record.
“I think it’s probably as good as anything we’ve ever done,”
says Mills. “It’s got the energy of Accelerate, but it’s much
more diverse in the same sense that Automatic For The People
was diverse.”
“We’ve never made a record that has 12 songs as good as
this,” Buck concludes. “I don’t think we’ve been as excited
about a record in the last 20 years.”
