Michael Shannon Loves Music Like We Love Music

Michael Shannon clutches the mic. He’s onstage in NBC’s Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Center, his chin tilted up toward the lights. A moment of tension builds as he inhales, and then — right when you’re starting to wonder how is this going to go? — he delivers his line and he nails it. He’s a movie star. A two-time Academy Award nominee. It should come as no surprise that he can deliver a line. But Shannon is not acting. In fact, what it looks like is that he’s engaged in whatever the opposite of acting is. Of living, I guess. Of being inside every second. Because what Shannon is really doing is singing “Driver 8” — the second single off R.E.M.’s 1985 album, Fables of the Reconstruction — in front of a live studio audience on “The Tonight Show.” And he looks like he can’t quite believe it.

“I was just trying not to fuck it up,” he says, a week later, gazing into the distance. 

He’s Zooming with me from his living room in New York City, where it looks like I’ve called to settle a job with a hit man. He’s wearing a white satin track jacket, his arms are crossed, and his face … Well, you know the face. With more than a hundred film and television credits to his name, Shannon’s deeply lined features — equal parts handsome and startling — have been ubiquitous on our screens for 32 years. Since his first small role in “Groundhog Day,” through best-supporting actor nominations for “Revolutionary Road” and “Nocturnal Animals,” and up to his more recent work in “Knives Out,” “The Flash,” and “A Different Man,” Shannon has been a perpetual critical darling in both mainstream blockbusters and arthouse gems. 

But he’s also been playing music. And listening to music. And thinking about music. And in all honesty, Shannon says, it’s something he feels more passion for even than acting. 

“My first two cassettes were Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required and Stevie Wonder’s [album with] ‘Part-Time Lover’...” he says, remembering that Christmas morning in Lexington, Kentucky, long ago, when his mother gifted him his first tape player. Then he shrugs, as if it’s pointless to put the rest into words. It’s the same for us all, he seems to be saying, the way music exerts its magical influence over the course of a lifetime.

Shannon sang in the local children’s choir, he learned the piano, he played bass in jazz band, and eventually formed his own high school band — Jehovah’s Suspects, known for playing at least one Shannon original, “The Armadillo Song” (whose chorus includes the immortal lines I’m an armadillo with a hard shell / I look scared and ugly and I got a strange smell). By the 2000s, Shannon was fronting his own thoughtful indie rock trio, Corporal, but it wasn’t until 2014, when he teamed up with alterna-rock sideman Jason Narducy (Bob Mould, Verböten, Superchunk), that Shannon’s love of music found its current singular outlet — and in doing so, a far wider audience than ever before.

Over the course of the past 11 years, Shannon and Narducy have collaborated on a series of popular one-off shows in which they’ve performed entire albums by some of their favorite artists. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, The Smiths, and T. Rex are a few who’ve gotten the treatment. Then, in July 2023, Shannon and Narducy decided it was time for R.E.M.’s 1983 debut, Murmur. It was the album’s 40th anniversary, and the venue’s 40th anniversary too (The Metro, in Chicago).  On the day of the show, R.E.M.’s own Mike Mills showed up and joined the band onstage. By the end of the night the whole thing had been such a wild success that they were inspired to take their act on the road.

“I’ve just never had an experience like it in my life,” Shannon says, of the sold-out nine-show tour that followed. “I mean, going into the First Avenue club in Minneapolis, and walking out in front of 1,300 people — which was the biggest crowd I had ever sung in front of in my life — and playing “Radio Free Europe,” and hearing people screaming and wailing like it was some sort of religious experience. Even if you’re doing a play with a live audience in a theater … that kind of primal situation, it’s not the same thing.”

All photos taken January 2025 at the iconic Hotel Chelsea in New York City. Landon Nordeman photographed Shannon in a Chelsea Grand Loft (one of five, dating back to 1885), on a second floor balcony, and in a banquette where Andy Warhol once held court. The spirits of rockers, artists, and writers past were with us. Shannon wears Todd Snyder x Woolrich.

Months have passed since that night, but the awe is still thick in Shannon’s voice. I get it, he’s just a human being like the rest of us, but still there’s something endearing about hearing a movie star be amazed by the crowd in a mid-sized club. Shannon has joked before about how his music career isn’t paying his bills, and one can wonder if he might not have something better to do with his time than play in what is ostensibly an R.E.M. cover band, but Shannon’s compass points only in one direction. 

“It’s just love,” he says. “It’s just love. I just love music and I love this music and I love this band.”

So that’s why Shannon is singing “Driver 8” on “The Tonight Show.” Because he’s in love. It’s also why Shannon and Narducy are performing yet another R.E.M. album turning 40 this year — Fables of the Reconstruction. They aren’t playing just a few shows in support of it this time, though. They’re touring America for a whole month, then they’re going to the UK. 

Shannon knows how it goes. An actor leverages his celebrity to mount a music career, he puts out a record that wouldn’t have seen the light of day if not for his name, and then we all groan in embarrassment as the actor slinks back into the Hollywood hills. (I’m looking at you, Russell Crowe. And you, Steven Seagal. And also you, Bruce Willis, even though I love you. Sorry.) It’s an awareness that largely drove Shannon to set aside his own songwriting ambitions years ago.

“I kind of walked away from it,” Shannon says. “Because, if nothing else, it just seems kind of greedy. It’s like, how much good fortune can one person expect to have in their life?” He shakes his head. “I’m not a fan of actors having rock and roll bands.”

Shirt: Marni, T-shirt: Everlane, Jeans: FRAME, Boots: Balenciaga

Shannon is a fan of rock ’n’ roll bands, though, and it’s one of the reasons he’s managed to avoid the usual actor-as-musician pitfalls, because by celebrating the work of others instead of just shining the spotlight back on himself, Shannon has found a way to serve as an avatar for us all. He’s a movie star, yes, but also a music lover, and he’s inviting everyone to the party.

“I mean, basically what we’re doing is glorified karaoke,” Shannon says, “and karaoke is, you know, on the one hand kind of an embarrassing ridiculous thing. But on the other hand, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful, moving thing that allows anybody, literally anybody, to go up on stage and sing a song that they love and sing it with as much passion or however the hell they want to sing it.”

It doesn’t hurt that Shannon has been joined by a band of indie rock giants. The lineup — “an embarrassment of riches,” as Shannon describes it — includes Narducy, an industry staple, as well as bassist John Stirratt (Wilco), drummer Jon Wurster (Mountain Goats, Bob Mould, Superchunk), guitarist Dag Juhlin (Poi Dog Pondering), and Vijay Tellis-Nayak on keyboards. (In Europe, bassist Nick Macri will fill in for Stirratt.)

It’s a passion project for everyone involved. 

“I’m at a point in life where I only really do things that I like to do anymore,” says Wurster, who recorded a few tracks for R.E.M. himself after Bill Berry’s 1997 departure from the band — just two years after Berry suffered a double aneurism on stage — “and this is one of them.”

“I just feel blessed to be standing next to them,” Shannon says.

When he is standing next to them, though, Shannon doesn’t seem out of place in the least. In fact, if you didn’t know that his day job was acting in major motion pictures, you’d think Shannon was just another run-of-the-mill rock ’n’ roll frontman. His baritone singing voice is strong and a bit earthier than Stipe’s, lending its own unique rasp to the material while still evoking the classic Stipe lines that we all know.  

“He’s a real musician,” says Dave Wilson of Chatham County Line, the celebrated Americana group that served as backing band for Shannon’s portrayal of country legend George Jones in the 2022 television miniseries “Tammy & George.” “He knows what he’s doing and is perfectly at home on a stage.”

“Yeah, for sure,” says drummer Wurster, insisting that Shannon is not only on par with every other musician in the band, but fits in at practice as well. “We rehearse in Jason [Narducy’s] basement.” Wurster stops here to laugh. “It’s just like any kind of punk band practice where you’re all on top of each other. And Michael’s no different. He’s there singing in his little corner, and we stop if someone fucks up and start over again. It’s great.”

More than Shannon’s skill or devotion to the material, though, the outpouring of public support he’s enjoyed for these performances might come down to something more fundamental to what the whole project is all about — the music itself, and the band that created it.

Over the course of 31 years, from 1980-2011, R.E.M. released 15 albums — including mega-smashes Out of Time and Automatic for the People, which came out within 19 months of each other, in 1991 and 1992 — and in doing so defined what it meant to be a rock band working at the highest levels of commercial success while maintaining absolute artistic integrity. Their songwriting catalog — a vast exploration of high art, folk art, and the Deep South, all suffused with angular sophistication and testosterone-free swagger — was groundbreaking at the time and is only getting better with age. For a stretch, R.E.M. was the most important band in the world. Many people think it still is. The musical world tilted under their influence. It’s remained at that angle since.

“I had all their cassettes, all the CDs,” Shannon says, but Document is what sucked him in. “That record is like a thunderclap from the heavens,” he says. “I mean, if you don’t like R.E.M. after you hear that record, something’s wrong with you.”

He moved on to Lifes Rich Pageant, then on to Green, and then on and on in both directions, back into the band’s catalog and forward as each new album came out. 

“I describe R.E.M. as music I liked to listen to when I was walking around by myself, on my Walkman,” Shannon says. “It just felt like a very personal experience. It felt like the soundtrack to my life. But that’s the amazing thing about this music; it feels like the soundtrack to so many people’s lives.”

Indeed, there were so many of us who let R.E.M.’s music seep into our lives through the magic of foam-padded headphones, and while R.E.M.’s songs are still there for us to listen to whenever we want, R.E.M. as a band is now gone. 

Just once: that’s the total number of times they’ve played together since their retirement in 2011. And that performance was of only one song — their 1991 hit, “Losing My Religion” — which they played at their induction into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in June 2024. Go watch it. You can dial it up right now. It’s four-and-a-half minutes of proof that, if they wanted to, R.E.M. could pick up right where they left off and dive as deeply as they wished into the depths of todays’ alt-rock nostalgia industry. 

It’s not going to happen, though. 

It would take “a comet,” bassist Mike Mills has said, of what it might take to reunite. 

“It would never be as good,” added guitarist Peter Buck.

So what’s a fan to do? 

Shannon wears Marni, R.E.M. T-shirt: Metropolis Vintage

Well, if Shannon and Narducy’s last tour is any indication, you could attend one of their performances and you might just find R.E.M. in the club with you, singing along. Some of them might even get onstage. And that’s why, when Shannon and Narducy’s last tour took them to Athens, GA — hometown of R.E.M — Shannon was a nervous wreck.

“I was very anxious about doing that show,” Shannon says. “Extremely anxious.”

He’d met R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe before, at a screening of Shannon’s 2016 film Midnight Special, and the two had hit it off. But that was on Shannon’s turf. This time he was rolling into the home of not only R.E.M., but so many foundational acts of the vast and sophisticated musical movement once simply known as “college rock.” It’s easy to think of music as an object that exists outside of time and place — something there for us to take off the shelf and use when we want it. But the truth is art is a creation that emerges from a specific time and place, and so our relationship to that art is always connected to that time and place, even if we’ve never been there. But now Shannon was there. He was in that place.

Stipe invited him to lunch.

“And then he said, ‘I want to take you on a walk,’” Shannon says. “So we walk down the street in Athens and he was just pointing to these little houses along the street and saying, ‘Well, that’s where we were when we wrote Murmur. Oh, and that’s the house I lived in when we did Fables.’” Shannon couldn’t believe it. It was like getting a tour of the Globe Theatre led by Shakespeare himself. “And then it all culminated when we got to these train tracks and Michael pointed to a water tower and he said, “You know the water tower in the song ‘Time After Time,’ off of Reckoning? That’s the water tower. That’s what I wrote that song about, that water tower.’” 

Shannon was in shock. Even retelling the story, he sounds starstruck. Stipe escorted him to soundcheck afterward, and Shannon thinks it was a calculated move. 

“He walked in with me and just made it seem like it was completely natural, and it really helped calm me down,” Shannon says. “I think it was part of his strategy, I guess, to kind of let me know that I was safe and nothing terrible was going to happen, and that we would have fun. And we did.”

By the time Shannon took the stage, all four members of R.E.M. had appeared in the club. Drummer Bill Berry and guitarist Peter Buck joined Shannon’s band for the haunting ballad “Perfect Circle,” off Murmur, marking the first time they had performed together in 17 years. Mills pitched in on several other songs as the evening rolled on, and though Stipe never got on stage, he was just to the left of it, watching, dancing, and at times even mouthing along to the words.

“We were all just pinching ourselves,” says Wurster. “I think it meant as much to them as it meant to us. Peter [Buck] said something like, ‘It means so much to us that you’re all doing this because these songs are such a big part of our lives, but they’re kind of not part of our lives anymore, cause we’re not doing it anymore.’ So I think they appreciate us putting in the effort to keep this music alive.”

The night ended with an afterparty at the offices of R.E.M.’s longtime manager, Bertis Downs, and to say the day was a lifetime highlight for Shannon would be an understatement.

“I mean, if you found a genie and a magic bottle and asked for three wishes and that was one of them,” Shannon says. “The genie would look at you like you were crazy. Like, ‘I can’t do that. That’s not possible.’ And yet it happened.”

Will it happen again? Who can say. By all accounts, the members of R.E.M. play their cards close to their chests. I’ve looked at the routing for Shannon and Narducy’s new tour, though, and they’re playing the 40 Watt twice this time, two nights in a row. So while this story won’t be on shelves until after both shows have happened, look me up if you want to. I’ll let you know how it went, because I plan to be there.

I have my own R.E.M.-shaped stamp on my heart, one I trace back to 1994, when I was 17 and visiting the campus of Princeton. I remember almost nothing of that beautiful and historic campus, except for the stretch of time when my host left me alone in his dingy dorm room for a few hours, during which I found a copy of Automatic for the People and proceeded to play “Nightswimming” on repeat for so long that his neighbor came over and asked me to stop. The profound beauty of that song, the images of a photograph on a dashboard and a shirt in the moonlight, the feel of swimming in open water in the Deep South at night: that’s what I remember about Princeton. Nothing about the place itself. Only the magic of R.E.M.

Later, I got accepted to the school but did not go. In fact, I didn’t attend college at all back then. What I did instead was go on tour with my own high school band, because what I wanted more than anything was not just to feel the same intoxicating rush I’d gotten from “Nightswimming” over and over again, but to create that feeling in others. Which is to say that I know what Michael Shannon is talking about when he talks about love. Because I love music too. It’s a universal story. Different settings. Different bands that get us hooked. But all of us have been marked.

Here’s where this story becomes a Trojan horse, though, because while it might still look like a story about Michael Shannon, there’s a smaller story about me hidden inside. That high school band of mine, the one I went on tour with instead of going to college, we signed a record deal with Atlantic Records and had a hit song. Not a big hit. You don’t remember us. And I was only the drummer. But the story is true: “What I Didn’t Know,” by Athenaeum, the band we formed to play my eighth-grade dance, reached  No. 14 on Billboard’s alternative rock charts in 1998. 

That was a million years ago now. I’m a writer these days, and for the most part I rarely mention to people that I’m also a drummer. It’s just easier to be one thing than two. My identity shuffle hasn’t been that hard to manage — I was never actually famous to begin with, and now I have a desk to hide behind. For Shannon, though, he has that face that everyone recognizes, and now he keeps taking it on stage to sing, which isn’t what he’s known for. Remember, just because Shannon is one of our finest actors doesn’t mean that he’s going to be a good frontman in a rock ’n’ roll band. It’s a totally different thing. So, for me, when Shannon steps on stage and sings Michael Stipe’s songs in front of Michael Stipe, I admire a bravery I’ve largely been able to dodge in my own life. It’s the act of an artist keeping himself vulnerable, staying fresh, and doing it with integrity and good taste and courage.

“For him it is a big risk,” Wurster says. “When you’re in the public eye as much as he is — I don’t want to use the word consequences, but the consequences can be different if you put yourself out there.”

The consequences for Shannon thus far have seemed largely to consist of people losing their minds while singing R.E.M. songs along with him. He’s received fawning press coverage for his performances. And his musical idol just gave him a personal tour of his hometown. 

Shannon isn’t ready to relax, though. Wurster says his commitment is on full display. 

“He doesn’t really talk a lot before the show because his headphones are on all the time,” Wurster says. “He’s not being aloof or anything, it’s just that’s how he gets ready. There are a lot of words to remember. And I’m not spying on him, but it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s really working on this.’ You get a real glimpse into his process. He’s one of the great actors of our time and you see him — well he’s not inhabiting the role of Michael Stipe, but he’s doing his version of that.” 

Shannon’s stance at the mic, the way he clasps it between both hands, the profile of the cord emerging between his fingers, the height of the mic stand in relation to his mouth, even his recently almost-shorn head — Wurster is right: you can see Stipe in the approach. It’s something Shannon says he isn’t aiming for. 

“I’m not trying to put across any particular persona,” he says. “I’m not attempting to be a rock star. I’m not attempting to be Michael Stipe. I’m just singing a song that I love. I’m singing a song that I love to the best of my capabilities. And that’s all I’m doing.” 

Before shows, in those hours when Shannon is wearing his headphones and going off into his own world, I feel confident he isn’t just reviewing the lyrics; part of him must also be traveling back in time to those days when he first heard these songs. A time when he was unknown and the music was all that mattered. 

Back in Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Center, the last note of “Driver 8” rings out. The crowd cheers and Shannon steps away from the mic. The rest of the band have all done “The Tonight Show” before. They know how this goes. Even I know how this goes. I’ve played “The Tonight Show,” and I can tell you it’s weird. The studio audience is small. You have to get there early and then sit around all day. By the end of it you feel great relief. Or at least that’s how it was for me, and it’s the same look Shannon has on his face right now: relief. But the rest of the band, the veterans, these guys look like they just finished playing their favorite song in Narducy’s basement after school. And I’m not suggesting that they don’t enjoy their regular gigs, but their smiles right now — big, real, almost bashful — suggest that they might have just had more fun than usual after four minutes of work. Shannon turns to look at them, his hands clasped behind his back, and for a second he looks much younger. Like he’s almost a boy. Maybe one who just finished listening to “Driver 8” on his headphones, dreaming of what it might be like one day to sing it in front of the whole country.  ◊