So what are you doing on June 11? I’ll be at Meriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., watching R.E.M. on tour. The band announced tour dates and the Meriweather show is the closest to me. They classify it as their Washington, D.C., stop, but Columbia is closer to Baltimore. Doesn’t matter to me. I saw […]

I was going to post this Friday, then the Monte Carlo fire happened and I got distracted. So you get an end of the week post on Monday. I like the way the new album is coming into focus piece by piece. If you haven’t visited the Ninety Nights website, go check it out. The […]

Yes, I’m back. I thought about posting the last few days, but figured today would be a better time to kick off 2008 with these two pieces of great news. Michael Stipe turns 48 today. I generally don’t do hero worship, but I think Michael (along with his bandmates) is one of the few people […]

Well, the news has started to surface about R.E.M.’s upcoming album. Michael Stipe – who declared the release a “great fucking album” – said recently that the band’s 14th studio release will come out on April 1. That’s probably no joke because April Fool’s Day is a Tuesday, the usual release day for new music […]

R.E.M. didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. The four members of the band owe much of their inspiration to the thriving music scene in Athens, Ga., where they all lived in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The quartet had watched the B-52s make it big and countless other local bands reach some sort […]

I read the “Today in History” column in my local paper pretty much every day. My favorite part are the celebrity birthdays. I always had a rule that once a musician turned 50, the could not be listed as a “rock” musician. I decided to change that rule yesterday when Peter Buck celebrated his 51st […]

I can officially get excited. R.E.M. has announced its first concert for 2008. We don’t know when they will release their next album. We don’t even know what it might be called. But we know they will play in Florida in March, and they have dropped hints that more shows will come. I, for one, […]

Last week marked three years since I have seen R.E.M. play live. On the “Around the Sun” tour, I headed up to New Jersey and caught them at The Borgata because the D.C. date two days later just wasn’t that convenient. A few things stick out in my mind about this show. I went alone […]

Less than a week ago, the Athens Historical Society hosted a program called “R.E.M. in Perspective: An Athens History.” The event featured panelists with all kinds of connections, including Kathleen O’Brien Layson, the woman who threw herself a birthday party in April 1980 and talked her friends into playing their first concert that night. Eric […]

I didn’t intend on rushing out to buy the new live R.E.M. CD/DVD. I wasn’t impressed by the track listing and really didn’t know when I would sit down and watch the DVD. That’s why I bought it the day it came out. I had to go to the mall to get a gift for […]