It’s been 40 years since the rock band R.E.M. shook up college radio with their debut album “Murmur” that helped pioneer the sounds of alternative rock to the point they helped define popular rock in the mid-to-late 1980’s and early 1990’s with hits like “Losing my Religion,” “The One I Love,” “Stand,” “Man on the Moon” and “It’s the End of the World as we Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

On Saturday, Mills will bring a special performance of “R.E.M. Explored” which will team him with the Southwest Florida Symphony and Grammy-nominated violinist Robert McDuffie for a fresh interpretation of R.E.M. hits along with a performance of Mills’ “Concerto for Violin, Rock Band, and Orchestra” which he co-wrote and helped arrange.

Mills doesn’t want to give away which R.E.M. songs will be performed Saturday. Part of the fun is for the crowd to figure out which songs the orchestra is playing, he said.

From 1983 to 1988, R.E.M. recorded six critically-acclaimed albums before their biggest hit in 1991 with “Out of Time,” which won a Grammy Award.

In their early days, the band mixed the up-tempo post-punk rock rhythms with songs like “Radio Free Europe,” “Moral Kiosk,” with hints of David Bowie, the more contemplative songs of The Beach Boys, The Police and the British New Wave with songs like “Fall on Me,” and “Catapult.” The band scored made such an early impression with critics that their debut album “Murmur” was named the best album of 1983, besting legendary records like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” U2’s “War” and The Police album “Synchronicity.”

“We were a very busy band and loved to write songs,” Mills said. Along with singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and drummer Bill Berry the group kept the same lineup for their entire career and all album songwriting groups are credited to the group entirely.

Mills said the sharing of songwriting credits “kept the band together.” Mills said Stipe was responsible for much of the lyrics. Later in the band’s career, they helped bring attention to environmental issues and other social issues such as AIDS and gun violence though Mills said they weren’t a political group.

A talented multi-instrumentalist, Mills will be playing guitar, piano and bass during the concert. With R.E.M., Mills would also piano, accordion, vibraphone and even harpsichord in addition to his bass duties. “They all flow from the piano,” Mills said. Largely unknown is his contribution on piano to the Smashing Pumpkins song “Soma” on their 1993 landmark album “Siamese Dream.”

A standout bassist, Mills was known for his shifting rhythm patterns and melodic bass parts in a way that contemporaries like Adam Clayton is known for with U2.

Mills cited Gang of Four and The English Beat as contemporary groups to R.E.M. that he respected.

The son of a U.S. Marine, Mills said his parents Frank and Adora were both musical. Frank was a “classical tenor” who liked to sing at parties and at church, Mills said. His mother played the guitar and piano. Mills grew up in the 1960s and was influenced by the AM radio sounds of The Allman Brothers, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, the Zombies and country music.

R.E.M. has not played together since touring in 2011. The chances of them reforming are unlikely, Mills said.

“We’ve done the best we could,” he said. Mills also said it would be a “monumental undertaking, it would be fun” to reform the Backbeat Band, a 1990’s supergroup that he played with and recorded the soundtrack to the independent film “Backbeat,” based on the early days of The Beatles. The group included members of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, The Afghan Whigs, Gumball and Soul Asylum.

The group only played one concert, a smashing performance at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, that included electric covers of The Beatles songs “Money” and “Helter Skelter.”

“It’s hard to get them together” again, he said. Mills called the group “serious players” and “kind of underappreciated.”

Looking back at R.E.M., the group he played with for more than 30 years, Mills said he is most proud that they had a “long, successful career and we had integrity.”

Mills thanked the symphony for “taking a chance on this. It’s a new thing and a lot of orchestras aren’t willing to step out and do something different. We are just trying to bridge the gap between classical and rock and roll and show people you can like one and you can like the other. We are trying to show people they aren’t necessarily as separate as people thing they are.”