R.E.M. will officially release their “great lost track” ‘Devil Rides Backwards’ on the 25th anniversary expanded edition of Automatic For The People.
R.E.M. never got around to finishing ‘Devil Rides Backwards’. Michael Stipe says he would have even changed the lyrics slightly had they gone back to conclude the track.
In the song “the devil rides backwards on a mule”. “That was a mistake,” Stipe says. “It’s supposed to be a horse. I think that phrase might have been something that Peter pulled from literature. He thought it had a nice ring to it.”
Peter Buck also regrets that Michael never got around to finishing the lyrics. “That was the one that I most wanted to have on the record,” he says now. “I really loved that song. Michael just didn’t feel that he had it and he likes to work by inspiration. But I remember I was in New Orleans and I played a cassette of a lot of rough mixes to a bunch of people. Five years later they’d go, ‘Gosh, whatever happened to that Devil Rides Backwards song?’ It got pretty close but it was never finished. So it’s on this.”
The 25th anniversary edition of ‘Automatic For The People’ will be released on November 10.
