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.

Michael Stipe

Categorized in : Thinking Joy Writing

By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.

Michael Stipe

sexy dark america

I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It's where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira's band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous.

Michael Stipe

cowboy jealous new-york

The punk-rock ethos was "Do it yourself. Anyone can do this. We're not sent from the heavens."

Michael Stipe

ethos rocks heaven

[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.

Michael Stipe

horse new-york order

So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we're kind of an international phenomenon.

Michael Stipe

east band southern

I'm not homosexual, I'm not hetrosexual, I'm just sexual.

Michael Stipe

homosexual music

Everybody hurts sometimes Everybody cries

Michael Stipe

cry hurt sometimes

The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I've always been very literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I was like, 'OK, that's me.'

Michael Stipe

punk ethics kids

When you meet a stranger, look at his shoes. Keep your money in your shoes.

Michael Stipe

shoes stranger looks

To be called an elder statesman is so unbelievably insulting.

Michael Stipe

insulting three years

Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.

Michael Stipe

broccoli cameras

They always want me to play myself and that's a big snooze.

Michael Stipe

bigs want play

When I get really hammered I take my clothes off. That's a sure sign. It's been a long time since the last time I did that. Probably a year.

Michael Stipe

clothes long years

I was born in Georgia. That's where my grandparents-and all my people-are from. But my family traveled a great deal because my dad was in the army as a helicopter pilot.

Michael Stipe

dad army people

I'm just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I've written about.

Michael Stipe

fascinating written persons

For me, as a music fan, visuals kind of steal away the purity of the song. My instinct is not to provide a visual to go with a piece of music. But here's MTV. It's really powerful.

Michael Stipe

mtv powerful song

I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.

Michael Stipe

tired periods reading

I'm kind of quoting Thurston [Moore] and Kim [Gordon] in saying that about not being great with addicts, because they are the ones who said it to me.

Michael Stipe

kim kind said

Frankly I'm not great with heroin addicts. I tried heroin, but it was by accident. I'm not great with that level of substance abuse.

Michael Stipe

abuse levels substance

I simply constructed a project to try to snap Kurt [Cobain] out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn't come out and wouldn't answer the phone.

Michael Stipe

wall phones house