![]() “We just wanted to do it whenever we had a new batch of songs, it was time to record!” “We were going through this streak where we were writing two good songs a week,” Peter Buck informed Rolling Stone. The band had a healthy cache of songs to plunder for their sophomore release, which would soon be titled Reckoning. Retrospective anecdotes from those involved have since claimed that the sessions lasted for anything from 10 days to three weeks (with the band taking a break for the Christmas period) straddling December 1983 and January ’84, yet what can be relayed with certainty is that all concerned wanted to record quickly and capture a record more representative of R.E.M.’s effervescent live sound. rejoined their tried and tested production team at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, early in December 1983. The quartet were less than enamored with the end results, though, and instead chose to reconvene with Murmur producers Don Dixon and Mitch Easter. had already recorded a batch of songs with Neil Young producer Eliot Mazer, who they briefly considered as the man to oversee the making of their second album. Listen to Reckoning on Apple Music and Spotify.ĭespite a relentless touring schedule, resting on their laurels was not an option for the band, who were keen to record their second album before the end of 1983. Appearing on the prestigious Late Night With David Letterman, the group performed a triumphant version of “Radio Free Europe” and a rough version of a new song, the (then untitled) “So. began to make inroads into the national consciousness when they made their first major US TV appearance. Murmur had, however, been hungrily embraced by the band’s burgeoning fanbase, and, during the autumn of 1983, R.E.M. “We were expecting the record company to say, ‘Sorry, this isn’t even a record, it’s a demo tape. “It was an old-fashioned record that didn’t sound too much like what you heard on the radio,” Peter Buck later told Rolling Stone. As they looked to record its follow-up, Reckoning, the bar was already exceedingly high.įor R.E.M.’s part, while they were rightly proud of Murmur, they were still somewhat dumbfounded as to how the introverted album had helped to push them towards the mainstream. Though the Athens, Georgia, quartet had already achieved healthy sales for their independently released debut single, “Radio Free Europe,” and their IRS debut, 1982’s Chronic Town mini-LP, their full-length debut, Murmur, had exceeded expectations, selling over 200,000 copies and beating off behemoths such as Michael Jackson’s multi-million-selling Thriller to scoop Rolling Stone’s Album Of The Year prize for 1983.
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