The one band Michael Shannon can always find solace in: “Really incredible music”
Michael Shannon has been in the news lately thanks to superhero fans getting their mousemats all sweaty with excitement at director Zack Snyder sharing an unseen photo of the actor in his role as General Zod in 2013’s reboot Man of Steel.
Despite Snyder’s movie getting pretty mixed reactions on release, Shannon’s performance as the unhinged villain earned rave reviews and even over a decade later most people who have seen it can instantly conjure up a picture of him wide-eyed shouting at our hero Superman with neck veins bulging and a promise to end the earth in all manner of ‘didn’t get what he wanted as a kid’ ways.
Even if the film wasn’t entirely well reviewed it was still an enormous hit with movie-goers and remains the second highest grossing of all time, and it did wonders for Shannon, who had already been acting for 20 years at that point and earned an Oscar nomination in 2008 for the Kate Winslet film Revolutionary Road but hadn’t seen anywhere near the kind of exposure he got after Zod.
In the few years that followed Man of Steel, Shannon picked up a Golden Globe nomination for his role in the drama 99 Homes, then followed that up with Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, for which he won his second Oscar nomination. He was by no means done there, though, and in 2017 starred in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, the monster movie that would go on to win ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars amidst 13 nominations.
The next year, Shannon appeared in an extended music video for a band from Memphis called Lucero and their single ‘Long Way Back Home’. There was some nepotism involved, given that the band’s frontman is the brother of director Jeff Nichols, who has worked extensively with Shannon, but it also showed Shannon’s passion for music, aside from the fact that he actually has his own indie band called Corporal.
While his band performed their own songs, he has been known to tour and perform full cover versions of REM albums, including deep cuts from the past like Murmur and Fables of the Reconstruction, in addition to Neil Young’s long players like 1974’s Zuma.
Despite taking on what he calls “glorified karaoke” in doing entire albums, Shannon doesn’t try to imitate REM’s Michael Stipe in any way, but he does have an almost obsessive appreciation for the band from Georgia, as he told NPR, admitting: “…when we were talking about, you know, the dark ages of my life, I took a lot of solace in the music of REM. And it feels like this band made these songs just for you, when you listen to them, to help you, like, navigate the pain and absurdity of existence”.
He added, “And there’s so many people that feel that way. And yet it – you – that’s the thing about really incredible music, I feel, is that it’s very public and very private at the same time.”
Shannon and his band member Jason Narducy, who also plays with Sugar’s Bob Mould, toured the REM covers in the UK as recently as last year, and in Februar,y things came full circle for him when playing a gig in REM’s hometown of Athens, and Michael Stipe joined them on stage to take vocals for their song ‘Pretty Persuasion’. If that weren’t enough, REM drummer Bill Berry, who was watching the gig from the audience, also got on stage, and given it has been fifteen years since REM split up officially, it caused quite a stir.
Later this year, Shannon will be seen in Buddy, a horror sci-fi co-starring The Penguin’s Cristin Milioti, and will team up with Nichols again and Margaret Qualley on the horror King Snake.
