A

“And now for the embarrassing part of the day,”

Peter Buck grumbles to nobody in particular,

rolling his eyes. His band R.E.M. and a film crew

are milling around a space in Manhattan’s West

Side warehouse district that was once an S&M

club, but more recently the site of a fundraising

party for Republican presidential candidate Ron

Paul. They’ve wrapped the first part of a video

for “Supernatural Superserious,” the abrasively

anthemic first single from their 14th studio

album, Accelerate, and now it’s time for Buck and

his bandmates, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, to

pile into a van with the crew and French director

Vincent Moon to shoot more impromptu footage

at locations around the city.

Buck—a 51-year-old man of tasteful reserve

no doubt nurtured by decades of comfortable

stardom—is concerned that filming in public will

create an undignified scene. Moon assures him

that since today is a holiday (Martin Luther King

Jr. Day) and the temperature is somewhere in the

teens, few people will be on the streets. The van

pulls away, and I start walking home, block after

tedious block. Soon, I stumble upon the R.E.M.

van, glowing from within like the irradiated car

in Repo Man. I look inside the crowded vehicle,

parked on the bustling corner of 23rd Street and

Eighth Avenue, and witness Buck and Mills, 49,

ON MIKE MILLS: NICE COLLECTIVE JACKET, NICECOLLECTIVE.COM; ROGAN SHIRT, ROGANNYC.COM.

caught in the crude glare of camera lights, grimly

bearing down on their instruments in their winter

clothes. It’s so packed inside that Stipe, 48, a wool hat pulled way down over his

head, is smushed against the van’s window, talking on his phone while the other

guys are being filmed. I throw him the devil horns, and he waves back merrily.

Outside, on this frigid midwinter night, New Yorkers rush by on the sidewalk,

completely oblivious to the superstars a few feet away.

The van will wend its way to the trendy Lower East Side, where Buck, Mills,

and Stipe will perform the song acoustically in a restaurant, a wine store, and

a sex-toy boutique, but the passersby will remain nonchalant, and the scene

anything but undignified. This entire enterprise—the single, the video, and the

new album, which finds the band leaner and meaner than they’ve sounded in two

decades—isn’t meant to embarrass R.E.M., but rather to redeem them.

“Honestly, we’ve kind of laughed about the fact that we’ve had some declining

sales over the last few years,” Buck says. “But you know what? We’ve sold 50

million records, so we don’t have anything to prove in that regard.”

Still, even though R.E.M.’s place in the rock pantheon is cemented, 2004’s

Around the Sun sold a relatively paltry 233,000 copies and was their first in nearly

16 years to miss the Top 10. “Well, it hurts your pride a little bit,” Buck admits.

“But if you feel like you’re doing great work, then it’s not that big of a deal.” For

R.E.M., though, that’s proved to be a big if.

It’s two days after the video shoot, and Buck and I are sitting around a little

table in a swanky TriBeCa hotel. The gray, late afternoon New York winter light

oozes through a window behind him, casting him in silhouette and glinting off

the little gold hoops in his ears. When he’s not working with R. E.M., Buck plays

music more or less constantly, touring and recording with the Minus 5, Robyn

Hitchcock, and Tuatara. Thanks—if that’s the word—to chronic insomnia, he’s

a voracious reader, usually with three books going at once. He’s a restless man,

sitting with his legs crossed, right foot waggling with great speed and endurance,

seemingly of its own volition, not unlike an ivory-billed woodpecker.

The luxe digs are a long way from R.E.M.’s modest beginnings as one of the

great pioneers of the indie-rock underground in the ’80s, when they left their

home base of Athens, Georgia, to help to blaze a new trail of venues, fanzines,