R.E.M.’s Peter Buck Explains the Band’s Breakup

R.E.M.'s Peter Buck Explains the Band's Breakup

Former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, in a rare interview, has detailed to Rolling Stone the decisions behind the band’s 2011 dissolution. In 2008, Buck, Michael Stipe, and Mike Mills were working on what turned out to be R.E.M.’s final album, 2011′s Collapse Into Now. “We hadn’t made an announcement or anything,” Buck told RS. “We got together, and Michael said: ‘I think you guys will understand. I need to be away from this for a long time.’ And I said, ‘How about forever?’ Michael looked at Mike, and Mike said, ‘Sounds right to me.’ That’s how it was decided.”

He added, “We felt like we made a great last record. The last two records we made — I’m really proud of them. Accelerate [2008] is in my top five. But we got to the point where we wanted to go our own ways. We didn’t want to keep doing 20-year-old songs.” Separately, he noted that making a couple of unspecified R.E.M. albums was more of a burden. “Once Pro Tools was invented, that was no fun,” Buck told Rolling Stone. “We made a couple of albums where I thought, ‘I don’t even know if this is a record. It’s just some sounds we put together.’”

Buck confirmed to RS that R.E.M. has precious few songs still waiting in the vaults. “We don’t have a lot of leftover studio songs that are finished,” he said. “We could probably put out an album of stuff that we thought was too mediocre to be on the original records. Why would we do that? Michael generally didn’t finish songs if he didn’t like them. It wasn’t like we had 20 songs to choose from for every album. We’d have 14, and 12 would make the record. The other two might be B-sides.”

He also emphasized the amicability of R.E.M.’s split. “I like the fact that we walked away from it, and we’re not bad-mouthing each other,” he told RS. “We’re not suing each other. Technically, the band broke up. But we didn’t really. We’re just not making records or touring.”

Elsewhere, Buck discussed what he hates about the music business (“Everything”) and outlined his many ongoing, low-profile musical ventures, including co-producing the Jayhawks’ upcoming Paging Mr. Proust LP, collaborating with Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker as Filthy Friends and with latter-day R.E.M. guitarist Scott McCaughey in their longstanding group the Minus 5, and releasing vinyl-only solo albums such as 2014′s I Am Back to Blow Your Mind Once Again and 2015′s Warzone Earth

Read the full interview here.

Read An Oral History of R.E.M.’s Out of Time.

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