I have procrastinated posting this, but the boys of R.E.M. – well two of them at least – have started the process that will hopefully lead to the follow-up to Accelerate. Peter Buck and Mike Mills got together in Portland last month with Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey, who are basically non-voting members of the band now to demo some material.

I had read somewhere that the band will not release an album this year, which bummed me out, but this news kind of bouyed me. If they can at least get started now, I think the prospects for an album in 2010 are good.

Pitchfork had a cool interview with Buck, which shed some light on how the band works, particularly about the process this time around. What I liked was seeing again was the notion that they don’t lock themselves into some routine.

Well, we’ve done it different ways. But we always like to play together and come up with stuff. In the Athens days, we would just go in every day and play when we all lived there, and Michael would come in once a week or maybe he’d skip a week or whatever. So it’s kind of the way we used to work back in the 80s. As we’re doing the demos or whatever they are, we’re always thinking, “Gosh, will Michael like this? Is this something he feels like singing? Is this going to inspire him? Does it sound too much like something we’ve done in the past?”

I loved the return to fast, fun rock on the last album, and Buck says he hopes to have a more “broad” album when R.E.M. releases its next album. That notion excites me because I think the fact that Buck kind of led the way for Accelerate over the over-produced sounds that Mills and Michael Stip engineered over the prior few albums. If Peter wants a broad album that showcases the range of the band, let it happen.