R.E.M.-No New LP Until 2011

Demos have been recorded, however.

By Fred Mills

Although there's been plenty of fresh R.E.M. news in the mix of late, from word about a new live digital EP to be followed in the fall by a two-CD concert set, to the recently reissued Deluxe Edition of Reckoning (see our review here), what people REALLY want to know is when will the next studio album arrive.

Not anytime soon, according to band pal and auxiliary member Scott McCaughey, who indicates that he and several of the other musicians, minus Michael Stipe, have done some recording but that there are no formal plans to cut fresh material until the end of the year - and that it would probably be 2011 before something hits the stores.

"We're basically on a year off," McCaughey told BLURT's Jud Cost, in a recent interview. "The tour ended around Thanksgiving. As it happens, we've gotten together to do a little recording, just throwing down instrumental tracks. We got together in Athens for a few days, then Mike and Peter came to Portland and Bill came down and we got a studio for a week and banged out twelve or thirteen instrumental tracks. They sounded really great.

"There are no plans to get into the studio again until the end of this year. I could see by January we might start recording. But the next record won't come out, I'm guessing, until 2011. They were just demos, but the stuff we recorded sounded fantastic, so we'll have to see what Michael comes up with."

You can read the entire McCaughey interview next week at BLURT, where he holds forth on R.E.M. along with his various other projects - the Minus 5, the Venus 3 (w/Robyn Hitchcock), Young Fresh Fellows, etc.