Begin the Begin - Buck
These Days - ?
Fall On Me - ?
Cuyahoga - ?
Hyena - ?
Underneath the Bunker - ?
Flowers of Guatemala - ?
I Believe - ?
What If We Give It Away? - ?
Just A Touch - ?
Swan Swan H - ?
Superman - Mitchell Bottler and Gary Zekley
I assume Cuyahoga was Mills because of the bass intro.
Read somewhere else on here, can’t remember where, that Berry wrote the Cuyahoga bassline.
For what it’s worth, Wikipedia states that Cuyahoga “was written primarily by R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry.”
Begin the Begin - Buck
These Days - ?
Fall On Me - Buck
Cuyahoga - Berry - verses, Mills - chorus (as it turns out - most of the bass intros were written by Bill…)
Hyena - ?
Underneath the Bunker - probably Buck?
Flowers of Guatemala - Started out from Buck and probably mostly Buck, but Berry played a significant role in it.
I Believe - ?
What If We Give It Away? - ?
Just A Touch - one of the fisrt Buck tunes ever, a pre-REM song.
Swan Swan H - Buck
It does seem that Berry often contributed hooks and then the band would flesh out songs.
After some further snooping I can safely add -
Underneath the Bunker - Berry
What If We Give It Away - Mills
Interesting! Any idea if Berry started Bunker on guitar, or if they built it around the percussion track?
Guitar based. from what I gather Bill never wrote an entire song on drums, it was always guitar/bass/keys. there are a few tracks (Lightnin Hopkins for example, maybe King of Birds as well, not sure) that started from a certain beat, and the guys took it from there…
I think I read somewhere that Tongue began with Berry playing a beat on the drums, and Mills creating the piano part based on that. How The West Was Won and Where It Got Us is another that may have started with a beat that got turned into a song. Again, if I’m recalling correctly. All of the interviews start to blur together after a while.
In Craig Rosen’s R.E.M.: The Stories Behind Every Song, he quotes Peter, I think, if memory serves, explaining that Underneath the Bunker was written during the Fables sessions in London after they went out to dinner at a Greek restaurant and went back to the studio and tried to create their own version of the “ethnic” music they had heard during their meal. Supposedly, Underneath the Bunker was recorded during the Fables sessions, but that take is lost. It was later dug out of mothballs for Pageant, along with Just a Touch and Why Don’t We Give It Away, because the band was short of new material.
In one interview, Peter talked about how Bill came in with the “C to D slide” idea for the verse of “Man on the Moon,” and that was basically all Bill had, and Peter described how he was the “finish guy” for a lot of Bill’s ideas, and that Peter took the C to D idea, and wrote pretty much all of the rest of the song. “Driver 8” was reportedly born the same way - in Peter’s account, Bill had the E minor / A minor / G progression of the verse, to which Peter added the chorus and the signature “riff” of the song.
