Last week, Michael Stipe and Jason Isbell joined Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff at a Pittsburgh Get Out the Vote concert supporting Kamala Harris‘ presidential campaign, and Stipe is continuing on the campaign trail; he joined Emhoff again on Thursday night (10/10) in Athens, GA. He told a story about encountering Harris and Emhoff at a Manhattan restaurant six years ago, and then, joined by David Barbe of Sugar and Andy LeMaster of Now It’s Overhead, performed R.E.M.‘s Fables of the Reconstruction track “Wendell Gee” for the first time since 1985, saying, “this first song was written here in Athens and I’ve performed it exactly four times in my life, so if I fuck it up just roll with it, it might get a little better.”
He followed that by playing a pair of much more recent solo tracks, “Your Capricious Soul” and “No Time for Love Like Now” (which he said had never been performed live in front of an audience before) and like he did in Pittsburgh, he also played R.E.M.’s “Driver 8.” Watch his whole performance below.
Stipe and Isbell also appear in a recent video speaking to Emhoff about voting and supporting Harris, which you can watch below. “There’s the comparison that has been made that voting for a politician is like taking a bus,” Stipe says in it. “You get on the bus that takes you closest to where you want to go. When you get off that bus, that’s when you have to start working. You have to do the walking.”
Meanwhile, a live rendition of R.E.M.’s “King of Birds” from 1989 is among the tracks on a new North Carolina hurricane relief benefit compilation, Cardinals at the Window.