Michael Stipe: When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few tim...

Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters.

Michael Stipe

environmental our-generation trying

I am not an autobiographical writer. I'll take little elements here and there from things that I've actually experienced-counting eyelashes on a sleeping beauty, for example.

Michael Stipe

eyelashes example sleep

Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don't really care what's playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it's easy to drive to or it's easy to sing along to or whatever.

Michael Stipe

radio care easy

You don't need to be talented. You don't even have to play the guitar to be a guitar player in a punk-rock band. So I, in a very naïve and teenage way, said, "That's it. I'm going to be in a band."

Michael Stipe

rocks teenage player

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

Michael Stipe

difficult-times records mind

I think my apocalyptic feelings went deeper than [heavily influenced by Reagan and AIDS]. I'm really at peace with how afraid I am.

Michael Stipe

aids feelings thinking

I had to get a driver's license and drive to St. Louis to find the punk-rock scene that was happening there. And there was a punk-rock scene. It was sweet. It was real. It was like everywhere else in the county. It was a handful of people who were feeling the same pull, and, of course, it was like the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer [1964]. Just the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the unbelievable eccentrics .

Michael Stipe

girl real sweet

I knew [Kurt Cobain] and his daughter. And Courtney [Love] came and stayed at my house. R.E.M. worked on two records in Seattle and Peter Buck lived next door to Kurt and Courtney. So we all knew each other. I reached out to him with that project as an attempt to prevent what was going to happen.

Michael Stipe

daughter doors two

When we signed with Warner Bros., they knew what they were getting. They knew they weren't going to get some easily manipulated prepackaged pop group. That was not going to happen. What they wanted, I think, was the integrity that we had to offer. What they wanted was the kind of street cred or cache that R.E.M. could bring to them and the chance that we would give them a hit or two. What happened was we gave them a bunch of hits. And we became huge.

Michael Stipe

integrity two thinking

I remember traffic jams

Michael Stipe

crazy girl boys

When I hear music as a fan, I see fields. I see landscapes. I close my eyes and see an entire universe that that music and the voice, or the narrative, create. A music video-and any other kind of visual reference-is created by someone else.

Michael Stipe

voice fans eye

If I'm tired of me, I'm sure the public is as well.

Michael Stipe

im-tired wells tired

I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.

Michael Stipe

teenager real sex

If you disagree with me, fine! Because that's the great thing about America, we can disagree!

Michael Stipe

fine great-things america

The artwork for the record is kind of an homage to that. It's a collage, which rhymes with homage, I just realized. It's an homage to this kind of almost like a teenager's idea of what the future might look like, if he were using a Xerox machine and cut-and-pasting it together. Which is exactly what we did to come up with the artwork.

Michael Stipe

rhyme kind together

Anything you do as a group is fraught with compromise... But everyone 's got to do that, right? It's part of being a good parent, or a good boyfriend, whatever.

Michael Stipe

good-parent compromise parent

The whole point of the punk-rock thing was that "We're not special. We just have a voice."

Michael Stipe

rocks voice special

At the [teenage] time, I did have an inkling of my sexuality. And I had an inkling that I was different from other people in ways beyond my sexuality. But I didn't get into music because I thought, Oh, these people will understand me.

Michael Stipe

teenage different people

In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.

Michael Stipe

break-out sound firsts

Punk-rock records came out and you bought whatever you could find. But Devo didn't happen for another three years. Sex Pistols didn't tour the States until '78. At that time, for me, it was really about CBGB, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Television.

Michael Stipe

cbgb rocks sex

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.