After 31 years of making music, R.E.M. has officially announced it’s time to call it a day.
From the group’s official website:
To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.” R.E.M.
Although the news comes as a shock to fans, R.E.M. band member Mike Mills says the group knows the time is right to say good-bye. “During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, ‘what next’? Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together,” offered Mills on the group’s site.
Michael Stipe echoed that sentiment, saying, “A wise man once said–‘the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.”
Mills added, “We have always been a band in the truest sense of the word. Brothers who truly love and respect each other. We feel kind of like pioneers in this — there’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart.”
And guitarist Peter Buck acknowledged R.E.M’s fans: “One of the things that was always so great about being in R.E.M. was the fact that the records and the songs we wrote meant as much to our fans as they did to us. It was, and still is, important to us to do right by you. Being a part of your lives has been an unbelievable gift. Thank you.”
“Mike, Michael, Bill, Bertis, and I walk away as great friends. I know I will be seeing them in the future, just as I know I will be seeing everyone who has followed us and supported us through the years. Even if it’s only in the vinyl aisle of your local record store, or standing at the back of the club: watching a group of 19 year olds trying to change the world.”
The group is planning a Greatest Hits album to be released in November 2011.
More on R.E.M. [Courtesy of Warner Bros Records]:
R.E.M. is unique in that they are very much still the group of friends from Athens, Georgia that they’ve been since the band formed in 1979. While their career has spanned 15 studio albums and huge global success, the band itself only ever comprised the four original members. The one person to leave this tight-knit group was drummer Bill Berry, who retired two years after suffering a brain aneurysm on-stage during 1995’s “Monster” tour. But not before extracting a promise from his band mates that they would continue on as R.E.M.: “Bill insisted he would stay, if his leaving meant breaking the band up,” remembers Michael Stipe.
Source: Warner Bros Records – Sept 21, 2011
