Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy & Friends, Portland, February 2026

Michael Shannon singing at Revolution Hall in Portland, Ore.

Nobody has the exact combination of vocal cords, sinus cavity and southern drawl that Michael Stipe has but it’s clear than Michael Shannon did his homework. And maybe the guitars weren't quite as jangly as the Peter Buck's, but Jason Narducy nearly fooled me.

People see cover bands for lots of reasons. Often, you end up at a bar where you didn't know there would be a band that night, and they're playing top 40 hits from a quarter century ago. Other times, the bass player works with your husband, so you finally agree to come by for a show. Very rarely, you seek them out.

I had read about the shows that Michael Shannon & Jason Narducy & Friends had done, where they play R.E.M. albums in full. They even played "Driver 8" on The Tonight Show.¹ At a show in Athens, Ga., the entire lineup of R.E.M. joined them onstage for a couple of songs. When the show came back around to Portland, I decided I had to check it out. Would it be fun? Or cringe?

R.E.M. were, for a few years in the 90s, one of the biggest rock bands in the world. They had a handful of big hits and a loyal following from their college radio days. When they called it quits in 2011, they left behind a huge catalog of great tunes with notable eras and a variety of styles. They ended on good terms, basically saying that the project was finished and that they had no interest in touring as a legacy band. Despite a handful of appearances together, they have yet to officially get back together. Seeing these songs played live by their original authors is seemingly a thing of the past.

By the time I found their ninth album, Monster, in a used CD bin in a head shop in my Indiana hometown, R.E.M. had already peaked. I was 12, maybe 13, still finding my own footing in terms of musical taste. But Monster kind of floored me. It was loud, weirdly poetic for pop music, of-the-times but commercial in only the barest sense.

I was also reading Stephen King's The Stand at the time, and the two are inextricably linked in my brain. ("Circus Envy" is absolutely a song about The Walkin' Dude, fight me.) That disc would live in my portable Panasonic disc player for months. Their next album, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, wouldn't spawn a number one hit, and thus passed R.E.M. out of the mainstream. Just as I was getting into them.

Eventually I learned that they had other albums, and signed up for Columbia Record Club almost exclusively to fill out their back catalog. Their earlier stuff was... different? But it also opened up whole new worlds to me, musically. So much of my musical knowledge can be traced back to bands I learned about through their association with R.E.M. Warren Zevon? One of my all-time favorites, and I only really know him beyond "Werewolves of London" because he made that Hindu Love Gods album with the members of R.E.M. Patti Smith? Richard Thompson? Natalie Merchant? Sure, I might have run into them eventually, but R.E.M. was my original vector.

I've grown up and moved on, nursed other niche musical obsessions. But I will always come back to this band. And it was lonely sometimes. Lots of other people like "Losing My Religion," but when you tell them that R.E.M. is your favorite band, you get a kind of surprised, curious look in response. "Oh! Cool." Favorite bands are weird like that – declaring yourself in thrall to one group of rich strangers. I met so few people over the years that had latched onto this band like I had.

Which was why, standing in Revolution Hall on Feb. 14, I felt elation. I was in a sold-out auditorium with other people like me! Perhaps some folks were there because they were curious about a movie star's oddball side project, but based on the people around me dancing and singing every word, I had the rare feeling of being home among strangers.

Shannon with the requisite megaphone.

The band is made up journeyman musicians who made names for themselves in their own rights, and they were clearly doing this for the love of the songs. During a recent interview, Shannon said that the R.E.M. songbook is remarkable, and that these songs should be sung². And he was clearly having a blast doing so. His performance straddled the line between professional mimicry and outright talent. Stipe's vocal catalog is full of weird, mumbled lyrics that often rise out of his baritone range into falsetto and wander in and out of alignment with the instrumental melody. It's not easy to recreate. Shannon nailed it.

The original promo image for the show.

They played all of Life's Rich Pageant, but that album only clocks in at about 38 minutes. So they also played another hour plus of bangers from across the catalog. Although they noticeably didn't play anything from the band's last three albums, which is probably just as well.

Life's Rich Pageant has several great political songs, written during the height of Reaganism, but equally applicable now. Perhaps because there are universal themes of dissatisfaction, or maybe because Stipe's lyrics are notably inscrutable and can be broadly applied. “Streets of Minneapolis” this is not, but “we are young despite the years, we are concerned, we are hope despite the times” hits just as hard. Shannon seemed to relish these moments.

Unofficial fifth member of R.E.M., Scott McCaughey, joined for several songs throughout the show.

I didn't grow up with "go to expensive concerts in your teens" money, so I only managed to catch R.E.M. play one time during their original run, at Chicago's United Center for their 2003 tour in support of a greatest hits collection. I was in the nosebleeds. They sounded great, I had a good time. But if I'm being honest, I think I had more fun in Portland last weekend. This is about as close as you’ll get to seeing R.E.M. play again, at least for now. Even unofficial 5th band member Scott McCaughey³ showed up, as well as Warpaint's Emily Kokal, who provided some backing vocals for a few songs.

Oh, and I wouldn’t recommend heckling Michael Shannon. People that shouted weird things mostly got his terrifying furrowed brow in response.