Newsgroup: it.fan.musica.rem
Titolo: Che fine hanno fatto i REM?

Sono molti giorni ormai che i principali siti dedicati ai REM non danno
aggiornamenti di alcun tipo. Sono ancora nello studio di registrazione a
lavorare sui nuovi brani oppure ognuno sta per conto suo, magari beato e
felice in vacanza? :-)
Raffaele.

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Pare che tu ci abbia preso con entrambe le ipotesi... questo l'ho
appena trovato su Murmurs.com... 
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R.E.M. are busy in the Bahamas with another recording session for
their forthcoming album and plans for a major world tour.
"We're finishing our next studio album," Michael Stipe told the UK's
Virgin Radio in a live telephone interview from the Caribbean islands
this evening. 
"We're working on 22 songs and, of those, we have 16 finished. So
we're just kind of trying to figure out what songs we can put together
to make the best record we can make.
"It seems like everything is either very, very quiet or very, very
loud... there doesn't seem to be much in between.
"Right now feels like a time when the songs are really just flowing
out of us. Not to sound like a hippy, but there it is.
"We've got a lot of material and we're just kind of refining it and
trying to get the best possible recorded version of it in the studio
and tinker around with that."
Asked what he meant by an earlier description of the forthcoming album
as "crystalline and real", he added: "I don't have the vaguest idea
even what the word crystalline means, but I threw it into one of the
songs this past week, so I guess I'm quoting myself - which is a
little sad, but there it is."
Questioned on the recording process, he said: "The other guys write a
lot of songs; I'm not quite so easy with lyrics, they don't come easy.
"You can write a pop song every day of the week, but how good is it? I
hold myself to a little bit higher calibre and I'm my own worst
critic; I don't want to do stuff that's falling off a log, I want to
push myself that little bit further.
"Doing the tour, where we recorded the DVD, and doing what we did,
which was tilt backwards for the first time in our career, we were all
raring to look forward again and that's what we're doing with this
next record."
Michael said the band will today discuss plans for a major tour to
support the next record.
"Bertis arrives this afternoon. We're going to sit down at dinner
tonight and try to hash out where we're going to go and how long we're
going to stay there," he said.
"The record will come out some time in the fall and we'll be on the
road for probably six to eight months and I'm really looking forward
to it."
-
He also talked about the idea behind the forthcoming Perfect Square
DVD.
"We wanted to work with the director Julia Knowles," he said. "She had
seen the band perform live and proposed the idea of doing a
feature-length film of one of our live performances.
"We chose Wiesbaden because, number one, it was a beautiful location
and we thought it would look really good on film, and, number two, it
wasn't London or Paris or Milan; it was a little bit off the beaten
path so it would make for a better performance because we wouldn't be
so nervous."
Asked if he got tired of playing "crowd-pleasers", Michael said:
"There are only a couple of 'crowd-pleasers' that we don't like
performing live so we pretty much play what we like and if we get
tired of playing them then we just don't.
"For the first time in our career, rather than looking forward to the
next studio album and the new group of songs, we kind of looked
backwards on this last tour and pulled up songs that we hadn't played,
in some cases, in 15 or 20 years."
When asked if the band played older tracks to recall the good 'ol
days, he quipped: "Well the good 'ol days are now for us.
"We decided that, through the internet, we wanted to involve the fans
in helping us choose what songs we would play from night to night.
"For the first time, we were looking backward. It's not nostalgic
because I hate nostalgia, but, in a way, staking a claim on what we
had done in the past 20 years with the idea in mind that we were going
to put out a best of record and no new record on the horizon.
"The reason we decided to tour without promoting something was just
because we wanted to. We kind of played the shows we wanted to play.
"We let the fans through the internet help us to decide what songs
they would like to hear and then we chose from them.
"So what we went up with was a very diverse and a very different
diverse set from the one the night before or the one we would do the
night following."
-
Michael was also asked for his opinion on Democrat front-runner John
Kerry.
He said: "I've been very impressed by the senator for some time and
that really came through Bertis Downs, the band's manager and lawyer,
who was talking about Kerry as long as a year ago.
"It's going to be a very fascinating year in politics in the US."
-
And, though he was speaking from the Bahamas, the place was far from
its usual sunny paradise.
"We had a giant thunderstorm come through," Michael said.
"It's not that bad though; the rain just stopped about half an hour
ago, things are fine now. 
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Poi pare che ci sia una newsletter in arrivo da Athens, almeno da quel
che ha scritto un tizio sul NG americano... era ora!!
Lo dicevo io che ci doveva essere una spiegazione al fatto che ieri
notte mi sono sognata il nostro bassista preferito :-))) ... che spero
se lo sia portato dietro il basso!!!
Ciao!!
Daniela

 "It's going to be a very fascinating year in politics in the US."
speriamo bene anche qui... ;)
Francesco
-- 
but like you said I guess yeah maybe I'm blind
well why don't you open your eyes you might like what you find
( Sophia, "Oh My Love" )