Michale Stipe and Chris Martin
against poverty
"The news cycle may have moved on,"
Stipe
said recently, "but this is going to be with us for years and years. A lot of people have forgotten about those affected or assumed or believed that they're now OK, that things are fine. They're not. There are still people who need a lot of help.".
For the charity effort, Stipe chose to cover Joseph Arthur's "In the Sun," a song he had grown attached to before Katrina.
After all these events of Katrina Hurricane Stipe enlisted Coldplay's
Chris Martin
and ex-Smashing Pumpkin James Iha to respectively sing along and produce a new recording of the song (see "Chris Martin, Justin Timberlake Help Michael Stipe Raise Katrina Funds"). ("Of course I said, 'Yeah!' " Iha said.) Luckily Martin was already in Georgia and in the middle of trying to enlist Stipe to sing with him at a concert. "I told him, 'I'll come sing with you in Atlanta if you come to Athens and do this song with me,' " Stipe said.
He then recruited Justin Timberlake to do a remix version through their mutual friend Lukas Haas; Timberlake brought in Will.I.Am to help out as well. "I didn't even think about it, I just did it," Will said.
"I really loved the elements they brought in, the way their ears heard the song," Stipe said. "If you listen really close, you can hear Justin singing backup in the chorus."
Stipe wound up with six versions of the song, each with a different vocal (all six versions are available on iTunes).
