Earlier this week, Mike Mills, onetime bassist for alt-rock band REM, said it would take "a comet" to bring him together with his former bandmates to perform one more time for adoring fans. The BBC notes that the comet must've hit—because Mills, lead singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, and drummer Bill Berry all took to the stage Thursday night to perform "Losing My Religion" at the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
"We are REM," Stipe said, per the AP. "And this is what we did." The quartet's appearance at New York City's Marriott Marquis hotel to play their 1991 hit, off of the album Out of Time, was their first performance together since they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. The band, which formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, lost Berry in 1997 after he suffered a brain aneurysm while performing, but the remaining three kept playing together until about 2011, at which point they disbanded.
"At that point, there wasn't anything we could agree on really, musically," Buck told CBS this week. "We could barely agree on where to go to dinner. And now we can just agree on where to go to dinner." CBS Mornings talked to the band earlier Thursday, noting they'd hinted at a reunion in February, when CBS visited the band in its rehearsal space in Athens and noticed the lyrics to "Losing My Religion" were on Stipe's music stand.
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"You are playing at Songwriters—is that right?" the interviewer asked. "I don't think we should announce it," Stipe demurred, to which the interviewer responded: "But I mean, you're thinking about it." Mills then replied, "Sure. We'll go that far. But you're sworn to secrecy." The band put up several posts on their Instagram following Thursday evening's event, including one that showed them on the SHOF stage, along with the caption "Another moment ... oh life," the latter part representing the first words of "Losing My Religion." Watch the full report from CBS Mornings here. (More REM stories.)
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