Actor Michael Shannon and musician Jason Narducy (Bob Mould, Sunny Day Real Estate) have been an active R.E.M. covers outfit for quite some time now, reliably touring the 40th anniversary of consecutive albums by the defunct legends and often getting members of the original band to jump onstage and join them. They're currently wrapping up a stint for the fourth one, Lifes Rich Pageant.

When the band played NYC's Brooklyn Steel last night, none other than Michael Stipe arrived to sing Pageant rocker "These Days" and one of the band's final hits, "The Great Beyond" from 1999's soundtrack to Jim Carrey's Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon. He hasn't performed either publicly in 18 years. The rest of the the setlist included all of Lifes Rich Pageant as well as a wide range of deep cuts, from 1982's "Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)" to 1998's "Lotus" and ended with Monster's punk outlier "Star 69".

Last year, Stipe sang Reckoning's "Pretty Persuasion" with the band in Brooklyn and his hometown Athens, GA, and the whole band was present for Shannon and Narducy's Athens show in February 2024, though Stipe didn't sing then.

Last week, the Athens stop featured guest spots from R.E.M.'s Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and the band's unofficial fifth Beatle Scott McCaughey. You can watch Stipe guest on the two songs at Brooklyn Steel below.