Former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe performed a pair of new songs during a short opening set for Patti Smith at New York City’s Webster Hall, performing the electronics-backed “Your Capricious Soul” and “Drive to the Ocean” with help from Andy LeMaster of Now It’s Overhead. Watch them here.

Former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe this morning debuted a short, 40-second song called “Future, If Future” — featuring his vocals over minimal electronic accompaniment — ahead of this morning March For Our Lives gun-control events across the country. Hear the full song right here.

Michael Stipe returned to the concert stage Sunday night, performing a short set — he covered songs by Nat King Cole, Ringo Starr and the Velvet Underground — during the Pathway to Paris climate event at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on Sunday. Watch the full performance right here.

Michael Stipe will make one of his periodic returns to the concert stage this weekend when the former R.E.M. frontman performs alongside Patti Smith, Joan Baez, Talib Kweli and Flea at the Pathway to Paris climate event at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on Sunday. Full details here.

R.E.M. has offered up the latest taste of its upcoming multi-disc 25th anniversary reissue of Automatic For the People in the form of a demo of the song “Photograph,” an AFTP-era track that, in its completed version, would feature a duet between Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant and appear on 1993’s Born to Choose.

A second previously unreleased demo of an unheard song from R.E.M.’s sessions for its 1992 classic Automatic for the People has been released ahead of that album’s reissue next month, a song called “Devil Rides Backwards” that’s being billed as the album’s “great lost track.”

Six years after the breakup of R.E.M., frontman Michael Stipe will debut his first-ever solo composition — a score made using Moog synthesizer gear — as part of an exclusive audiovisual installation he’s creating for Moogfest in Durham, N.C., this May. Tickets for Moogfest are on sale now.

Just weeks after revealing “I think I will sing again” in a TV interview, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe took to the stage Monday night in New York City as the unannounced opening act for Patti Smith at Webster Hall, performing a six-song set that included two numbers by his old band and four covers.

R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe appeared on “CBS This Morning” today to help promote the band’s recently released “REMTV” DVD box set, discussing the band’s history and his own future and the (un)likelihood that we’ll ever see an R.E.M. reunion (“That will never happen. There’s no point.”).

Former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe inducted Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last night at a massive ceremony at the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, declaring of the genre-shaping alt rock act that, “This is not just pop music. This is something much greater than that.”

There very well could have been a full-fledged R.E.M. reunion in Portland, Ore., on Saturday night as all four members of the defunct college-rock superstars performed after Peter Buck’s wedding. But, by all appearances, they managed to avoid such headlines, just barely, by not actually sharing the stage together.

It’s a nearly unparalleled landmark in the history of ’80s college rock: R.E.M.’s peerless debut album, Murmur, was released on April 12, 1983 — exactly 30 years ago today. Today we celebrate this milestone by looking back at the building blocks of the album we know and love.

It’s not exactly the return to music anyone would have guessed from Michael Stipe, but the former R.E.M. frontman is back with his first new recording since that band split in 2011: a duet with Courtney Love called “Rio Grande” off the new Johnny Depp-curated ‘Son of Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys.’