So you were at the big R.E.M. show last night?

Yea, verily.

How was it?

On balance — awesome! The two Professional Journalists in my car rated it “a solid B” and a B+ on the way home. I might even go as high as an A-. It was the fifth time I’d seen R.E.M. perform a full set since 1995, and it was certainly the second-best, if not the best.

What was so good about it?

Well, the setlist was pretty agreeable. A generous 27 songs, a third of them from Accelerate, their sleek, fast new album; the others an eclectic career overview. Not much in the way of the super-oldies or super-rarities that some of the other shows this tour have apparently featured; nothing from Murmur. But they did play “Little America”, “Driver 8”, and of course, “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville”. “Ignoreland”, from Automatic for the People, is not a song I ever suspected I would — or particularly wanted to — hear live, but it sounded good. Who knew it was about the 1979-80 Iranian hostage crisis?