R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck has explained the band’s 2011 break up in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
“We hadn’t made an announcement or anything,” Buck explained. “We got together, and Michael said: ‘I think you guys will understand. I need to be away from this for a long time.’ And I said, ‘How about forever?’ Michael looked at Mike, and Mike said, ‘Sounds right to me.’ That’s how it was decided.”
“We felt like we made a great last record,” he adds. “The last two records we made — I’m really proud of them. Accelerate [2008] is in my top five. But we got to the point where we wanted to go our own ways. We didn’t want to keep doing 20-year-old songs.”
“We don’t have a lot of leftover studio songs that are finished,” he said. “We could probably put out an album of stuff that we thought was too mediocre to be on the original records. Why would we do that? Michael generally didn’t finish songs if he didn’t like them. It wasn’t like we had 20 songs to choose from for every album. We’d have 14, and 12 would make the record. The other two might be B-sides.”
“I like the fact that we walked away from it, and we’re not bad-mouthing each other. We’re not suing each other. Technically, the band broke up. But we didn’t really. We’re just not making records or touring.”