Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Michael Shannon’s R.E.M. tribute reminded me why I love the band

The actor’s show with Jason Narducy is more than nostalgia — it celebrates the band’s artistry

Published October 7, 2026 12:00PM (EDT)

If you stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch MTV’s “120 Minutes,” if you made sure your VCR was correctly set up to record IRS Records’ magazine show “The Cutting Edge,” if your record collection is mostly vinyl because that was the superior format of the three that were available at the time and not because “you’re really into vinyl,” you are probably aware that actor Michael Shannon and guitarist Jason Narducy have been leading a project where they tour the country playing the songs of R.E.M., the former leaders of the original alternative nation. It began with a one-off playing “Murmur,” and they recently finished touring “Lifes Rich Pageant” and came through Detroit at the end of September.

The musicians in front of you are not the humans who originated the music, and that matters because the energy is not the same . . . That might have been part of my personal resistance, that my relationship with the material was based on the people who wrote it, and I’m not big on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.

There is no way this story isn’t personal; no telling that can leave out my specific interest in this body of work. I saw R.E.M. for the first time the night I graduated high school in 1981, when I took myself and my fake ID to a club in Mt. Vernon, NY, to see the Gang of Four. Someone standing near me asked who was opening: “R.E.M. They’re from Georgia.” I knew who they were; I’d heard the single on WNYU, maybe for once the opening band wouldn’t suck. They didn’t. In my 20s, I ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard in order to see as many R.E.M. shows as I possibly could. I published one of the first R.E.M. fanzines, sitting at my kitchen table in my third-floor Hoboken tenement walkup with an X-Acto knife and a glue stick. I later ended up posted at a Warner Brothers office overseas where I got to work on the beginning of that era of albums. 

And yet I found myself strangely apathetic and at times resistant to participating in any of the hoopla around the Shannon/Narducy ensemble. Every time someone tried to sell me on how great it was, all I thought was some version of: I saw R.E.M., I saw the actual band. Yes, I knew very well that the actual band had given their ringing endorsement to this effort. This was not about that. I wasn’t sure what the reluctance was, but then they announced a Detroit date, and I no longer had the excuse that I wasn’t going to travel to see this. 

“Lifes Rich Pageant” opens with “Begin the Begin.” If I were a baseball player, I’d think about using the intro to that song as my walkup music. It’s so immediately distinctive: 0 to 60 in five seconds, instant energy, a handful of guitar notes before all of the instruments rev up. There’s gritty distortion and glorious feedback, and if you, as an audience member witnessing this performance, weren’t sure how this was all going to land in your body 40 years later, those 10 seconds will completely........

© Salon