REM: Oldest material on new tour

When R.E.M. returns to the road on May 23rd to promote its latest album, Accelerate, the band will be playing songs reaching back to its earliest years, after having had fun doing that last summer with a series of shows in Dublin while recording the album. Guitarist Peter Buck explained: [ Click to listen if you have a backstage pass] "On the last tour, not the last tour, the last Dublin shows, we went back and learned a bunch of stuff from the early days that we haven't played in a long time, just to see where we came from, and it was pretty inspiring playing those. And you know, we're obviously gonna play the new record, but you know, we've been playing like nine songs off that, which is 28 minutes or something, so there's plenty of space for us to do stuff from all through our career."

Accelerate opened at Number Two on the Billboard album charts.

The band's most recent album, 2004's Around The Sun, is their only album not to have been certified gold for shipping 500,000 copies.

They will appear on the PBS show Austin City limits on May 24th.

The band's tour begins May 23rd and continues in North America , before traveling to Europe in July.
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