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By Jon Mooallem
When Michael Stipe was little, his parents called him Mr. Mouse. He was a scurrier. As soon as he could stand, he ran, and when he ran, he ran until he face-planted. His mother would deposit him in a baby walker, but if Stipe scrambled as fast as he could and hit the threshold of a doorway with a running start, he could topple the walker and eject himself onto the floor. Then he’d spring to his feet and run away.
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When I wasn’t going around in circles, I was dreaming. His whole life, thoughts, feelings, and sensory data passed through him with force. Their attention is directed elsewhere or vaporized entirely. During dinner he will say, “Me. ” I’m sorry, but the clavinet has absolutely taken me out of the conversation,” when suddenly a clavinet enters the restaurant’s background music. He’ll say, laughing to himself, after you ask him about his difficulty concentrating, “You’re not going to believe that, but you’re asking me again because my brain was wandering in the middle of the question. “
Sometimes, when Stipe’s spirit wanders away, he returns, like a cat in the open air, taking relics with him wherever he goes. The mention of “Calaveras County” takes him back to 1984, when his former band, R. E. M. , played a quintuple display at a carnival there. (“I was on crutches and I don’t forget Huey Lewis using my watermelon for myself, and I thought it was cute. “)The word “podcast,” pronounced in a quirky way, reminds him of the way Quincy Jones’ teenage daughter continually pronounced it “Todd” as she anxiously waited for L. L. Cool J. , aka “Todd,” to arrive at her house. Nastassja Kinski was also there. I was pregnant, radiant. ” Like the evening light,” Stipe said.
Madonna, Bono, Allen Ginsberg, River Phoenix, Elton John. Stipe is wary of looking like a dropper, but it’s just other people who populate memories of him. He remains stunned by his own fate. And it’s all because he had the courage, or the naivety, as a 19-year-old art student with floppy hair and ignorance, to move up to the level of three friends and sing, and then end up in one of the top bands. worldwide. For three decades, Stipe traveled the world with R. E. M. He has accumulated experience. And now he feels that everything is there, just on the surface; His brain bounces through a vast ether of memory, information and stimuli, in accordance with his entanglements and connections. One time (it would take a long time to understand why) I said “Regis Philbin” and Stipe proposed: “Regis had a very flat face in real life. “
This was a very long time ago, during our first conversation at the beginning of last year. It had been slightly more than a decade since R.E.M. disbanded, in 2011, and in that time, Stipe published three books of photography, exhibited his visual art at galleries, popped up at benefits, memorial concerts, political rallies and parties of all kinds. But now, finally, he was once again deciding to prioritize the single most special thing he’s capable of doing, the thing millions of people most want him to do: He would sing.
“I’m releasing an album!” Stipe excitedly told me: a solo project. He said this as if he were making a big announcement, as if I didn’t already know. (That’s the only explanation for why we were talking. )He said he expects the album to be released in early 2023.
“I’m in no rush,” I said.
We met for the first time in May 2022 at his art studio on the Lower East Side, a space that contained some of his own sculptural pieces and many other objects he’d collected: a pair of Nureyev’s ballet slippers, desks stacked on dressers. (“The idea of stacking furniture to me is really fascinating,” he said.) Stipe had recently recognized that he was “sitting on a landfill of my own making,” and he was working to break that great aggregation apart. He was selling or giving away much of his renowned collection of outsider art. At his other studio, at another of his homes, in Athens, Ga., his studio manager was cataloging the more than 30,000 photographs that Stipe has snapped, diaristically, throughout his adult life. “I’m healthy and young, but it feels like I’m inside a chrysalis,” he explained. “I’m shifting.”
He was then 62 years old: there is still a lot of sand in the most sensitive part of the hourglass. But, he explained, “I’m at that age where I’m realizing, okay: all those concepts I need to focus on, I’m not going to have the life expectancy to be able to do them all. ” He was not unaware of how many of the friends and acquaintances whose names crackled in our verbal exchange were no longer alive. Even when he went to meet “I, Stipe said, had gained alerts about the deaths of two other people he knew: actor Ray Liotta and Andy Fletcher, one of the founders of Depeche Mode. Stipe’s point: “I have to start pick and choose. “
He invited me to his next recording sessions, in September. But September turned into November. And in November, Stipe caught Covid. He was brutal for a week, then left a residue of sensations: “My whole body is buzzing and electric,” he texted. In any case, “I hope that we will postpone the assembly for a few days in December. “
December has passed. He planned it in January. But his uncle was hospitalized, and Stipe’s family regrouped in Athens to help him recover. January kaput. ” I referred to 22 as the year of flexibility by necessity,” he wrote in an email, “and I expect 23 will be the year of flexibility by choice. I remain positive on all fronts.
In February, a windstorm knocked over a pecan tree at his home in Athens, flattening his Tesla, which Stipe was actually happy about because he’d intended to get rid of the car, to disentangle himself from Elon Musk, and now the universe had totaled it and provided him with insurance money and permission to buy whatever he wanted. He and his boyfriend, the artist Thomas Dozol, had moved out of their apartment in New York and were living in a temporary rental. “I’ve taken overwhelmed to new weights and heights,” Stipe said on the phone, while a tremendous amount of unspecified clattering sounded in the background. But he planned to return to Athens for two weeks very soon, to hunker down and write: “I have to finish these songs already. They’re driving me crazy.”
That didn’t happen: “Life got in the way.” Later, he clarified that when he said, “Life got in the way,” he meant significant and unpredictable events, like a family health emergency or having a tree fall on your car, but he also meant that, for him, “life literally gets in the way.” He might sit down to make headway on a lyric only to tilt his gaze up momentarily and spot a flag flying outside the window — “Oh, there’s a flag! That’s cool. What does that ‘H’ stand for? Look how it’s directly between those two towers!” — or notice the severe look of his own reflection, how much it looked like something from Stalinist Russia. “Nothing is easy,” Stipe confessed. “I just get distracted by everything.”
March happened — all 31 days of it. Then came April, which “went kind of pear-shaped.” Stipe and Dozol moved a second time, quite suddenly and several months earlier than they’d anticipated. Stipe also went back and forth to Italy that spring to work with the curator of his first solo art exhibition for a major institution, opening this month at the ICA Milano. The show itself had already been postponed because of the pandemic, and Stipe had since reconceived it entirely, twice, and was now busily making it anew. (He also decided to put out another art book.)
At this point, he still couldn’t tell how disappointed he was by those riots – how much of them were riots, or if it was simply the abnormality of his ordinary life.
Then it was May again. Three hundred and sixty-one days had passed.
Just before Memorial Day in 2023, Stipe finally committed to barging ahead with his new material. He would spend a week at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, the legendary recording studio opened by Jimi Hendrix in 1970.
Taylor Swift was spending the same week at Electric Lady’s, spending time between appointments on her excursion Eras into one of the basement studios. Outside, a bunch of Swifties covered barricades, scouring their surroundings, checking their phones; The atmosphere was like a softly crackling campfire, in position for some other log. And then she emerged, straight into a vortex of screams and tears, as online experts wrapped themselves in their mind-blowing outfits and combinations of collaborators and friends. What were they all doing there?It was anyone’s guess.
Stipe had booked the studio on the third floor, which overlooked a rooftop terrace of the building. One night, I discovered him outside, in the middle of a verbal exchange with two young musicians I had just met. They were Jack Antonoff, one of Swift’s producers and one of pop music’s most prolific operators, and Matty Healy, the 1975 frontman. (This was during the short time that Healy and Swift were supposedly dating. )Antonoff and Healy were wonderful, R. E. M. They talked to Stipe at most in general terms. about music. The speech was fast-paced, encyclopedic, and cerebral, and Stipe listened with deep interest as they both exposed the madness of the new culture and made insightful critiques. “From Grimes to Caroline Polachek, I never imagined that Enya would be such a touchstone person,” Antonoff said at one point. Healy said he asked his 12-year-old son what kind of music he liked, what bands he liked and how utterly wordless the boy sounded.
“So I said, ‘Well, what songs do you like?’ And he said, “What whole songs? That’s his answer! The decimal point has moved! I didn’t realize that the call is now smaller than the song.
When Healy explained that, for years, he had harbored the denialist theory that R. E. M. Stipe, the first true emo group, reflected on the concept and said, “I was deeply depressed most of the time. “
Stipe’s relationship with music was different from theirs; The verbal exchange was not in his local language. When he intervened, which he did not do occasionally, it was regularly to explain a reference he had not understood. (What did Antonoff mean when he said Paul Simon “don’t understand?” His flowers from him? What does “pick up the bag?” mean) Stipe’s role in R. E. M. ‘s artistic process. it was sensory and receptive: he had 3 brilliant bandmates who were releasing new songs. Music was constantly on his mind, and it was up to him to take the specific songs that spoke to him and fuse each one with a melody. This dynamic seemed to carry over into the way he experienced music in general. He was no stranger to the lineages and influences of artists. However, he focused more on how his music felt in his body, whether those sounds made him move.
During a rare, microbeat of silence in the conversation, Healy turned to Stipe and asked, “Is it true you have one of Kurt Cobain’s guitars?”
“Peter does,” Stipe said — meaning, R.E.M.’s guitarist, Peter Buck.
Stipe, famously, tried to help Cobain toward the end of his life — though he stresses that this relationship has been mythologized over time. (He just figured he was qualified to offer Cobain support, he said: “We both had this same, strange job.”) But yes, he explained to Healy and Antonoff: Cobain and Courtney Love bought a house near Buck’s in Seattle in the early ’90s. After Cobain died, Love gave Buck one of her husband’s blue guitars.
“The Jag-Stang,” Healy knowledgeably.
“I don’t know what kind it is,” Stipe said. It’s nice and round. “
Twenty-four hours later, Taylor Swift would gush to Stipe: “Jack and Matty were saying they talked to you for hours yesterday. They were like, ‘Best conversation!’ They were so excited to be talking to you!” Stipe had been invited downstairs to say hello and, finding Swift standing in the doorway, extended his hand and said: “You must be Taylor” — an objectively cool thing to say to Taylor Swift.
There’s a scene there, man. Antonoff eventually reappeared with his wife of many years, actress Margaret Qualley. Florence, the one with the Machine, was passing by temporarily, spectrally, handing out greeting candy. The chatter rumbled exuberantly in all directions, as Stipe temporarily pointed to his friend and art studio. Director David Belisle introduced himself. ” David is a big fan of yours,” she told Swift, as Belisle blushed. “And he’ll come to see you on Friday!” (“Really?!” replied Swift, and. . . Unbelievable, he seemed really moved that this user would buy a ticket to his show. )At one point, Stipe turned to Phoebe Bridgers, whom he once met at a fundraiser: “All my goddaughters are big enthusiasts of yours,” he reminded her. And he asked, “Are you hiking all summer?”
Bridgers explained that she was about to play her last dates as an opener on Swift’s tour, but she’d still be on the road. “With boygenius. Do you know those guys?”
“Nuh-uh,” Stipe said. Then he turned to his maker and asked, “Really?
“It’s great,” he said Bridgers. Es my other assignment with my two friends.
“Oh, I want to know more,” Stipe said.
But there was an attractive moment on the roof. Eventually, Stipe revealed to Antonoff and Healy that he was running for Electric Lady on his first solo album. (Healy responded with a long, respectful four-letter note. )Stipe had no qualms about sharing how complicated the procedure had been so far and how time-consuming it was. Later, he would say to me, “I’m not at all. I have imposter syndrome at its worst. Sometimes, Instagram would offer him clips of R. E. M. concerts. , and wondered: where did this audacity to do this in front of tens of thousands of people come from?He told Antonoff and Healy, “It’s hard to compete with yourself. “
He says it with disarming sweetness. Antonoff tried to cheer him up. He explained that, when he creates something, he finds that it only takes a few songs that he’s proud of for the total task to start sounding forged enough. “You can wear them as armor,” he said.
But Stipe definitely disagreed. He recalled that, as a kid, he liked certain records, and then he would play something stinky somewhere on the B-side and he couldn’t forgive the band for that.
For him, one weak song can ruin an entire album and taints everything else.
Stipe’s purpose during his time in Electric Lady was to finish 3 songs and also record his part of a duet for an upcoming Courtney Love album. But those were the first sessions he’d done in at least 15 months, and he had to start listening. to it all over again. As he settled in, he spent a moment searching his computer for his endless words. “Master file. Solo album,” he said softly to himself, even though everything located the file.
Stipe was racing with Andy LeMaster, a musician and manufacturer discovered in Athens, Georgia, who is also one of his closest friends. (They met 25 years ago, Stipe told me, when Stipe photographed LeMaster’s boyfriend for “a series of other people holding a potato that looked like the Venus of Willendorf growing in my garden. They had written the record together, usually with synthesizers; Stipe doesn’t play any instruments with confidence, while LeMaster plays several. The songs were infused with synthesizer, pop, most commonly danceable, and Stipe was forced to explain this to other people who thought his new work would sound like R. E. M. More than once, I heard him say, “I don’t want electric guitars on this record. “I had Peter Buck like 32 years old. I don’t want any other electric guitars.
The first two nights in the studio, Stipe’s focus revolved around a song called “I’m the Charge,” a catchy, hard-hitting song in which his voice began with a mid-register growl and then rose through the tense chorus in the most convincing key. . path opposite to the agitation below. Listening to it is like walking through a subway car running in the opposite direction. (I liked it. )
Stipe decided it needed a live drummer — someone like the drummer from LCD Soundsystem, he kept saying. Eventually, he decided to text LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy to inquire. “What do I say to James?” Stipe asked LeMaster, phone in hand. “Does he ever ‘sit in’? Is that what I would say?”
“Session work,” LeMaster ordered. Drummer Pat Mahoney would appear in the studio 24 hours later.
In parallel, two things have become transparent in Electric Lady: the virtually infinite nature of Stipe’s artistic opportunities, and how vulnerable he felt, how insecure he was of what he had. He had amassed a small organization of brains to pay attention to. Among them were her boyfriend, Dozol – they had just celebrated their 25th anniversary – and her friend Tom Gilroy, a filmmaker and musician who wore a rosary-shaped bracelet made up of headphones. Gilroy was the loudest, the ultimate optimist and complete of loose ideas. (I would send Stipe more comments in a few hours, in the form of an eight-page essay. )He was adamant that one song, “Your Capricious Soul,” an edition Stipe released as a bachelor in 2019, would be a huge hit. “A song like ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ or ‘Born This Way,'” Gilroy said. “Once kids hear what it’s about, it’s going to explode. “
I asked Gilroy what the song was about. He said: “It’s about a child who discovers he’s not cis. But then he began to elaborate and finally provided an in-depth textual investigation of a line that seemed to surprise Stipe and elicit an awkward laugh.
I asked Stipe what the song was about. But Gilroy interrupted, mocking the futility of my question. “He’s going to say he’s a label manufacturer in Milwaukee,” Gilroy said. “This is a hardware store in Zimbabwe!”
Stipe smiled and didn’t respond. Lightning flashed outside. The rain had fallen, drenching the Swifties.
Stipe reverted to the concept that he had to produce several other versions of the song on the record. He imagined one of “Your Capricious Soul” with only orchestra and vocals. “It doesn’t even have to be my voice,” she said. Maybe it’s just a children’s choir. “Is there such a thing?
LeMaster leaned forward in his chair, a notebook balanced on one thigh. “Do you want to put that on your list of things to explore?” he asked.
It was a rare experience: being Michael Stipe, being part of R. E. M. , promoting some 90 million albums, doing a world tour. The organization was among the most acclaimed of its generation and Stipe was its most recognizable member. R. E. M. ‘s face was his face. In fact, that’s what his bandmate Mike Mills nicknamed him: Face. It was a way to laugh at the attention and adoration Stipe earned compared to the rest of the organization. In reference to Stipe, Mills came up with this after seeing a photo of Stipe’s status next to an Indian man, a six-foot black woman with an afro, and some other random person. A captioner, seeing Michael Stipe next to three other human bodies, classified the photo as “R. E. M. “
Stipe enjoyed being in R. E. M. I enjoyed being famous. It was also harder than his childhood, dreaming of making a song in a band, had imagined. The band spent much of their career traveling at a breakneck pace, at first haphazard and cash-strapped then in the midst of frenetic industrial-scale production, which tested Stipe’s structure and sanity. Mills told me, “Whether we like it or not, the exhibit lived or died through him. If Michael isn’t there, the exhibition would suffer. The paintings exploited the hypersensitivities and hyperactivity already vibrating within him, but they also amplified them in harmful ways.
Stipe had the foresight to quit drugs, but found himself devoured during the trip by the adrenaline blasts and injuries that followed. In 1985, after five years and four albums, the band reached a new and not easy point of success. But Stipe sank into a depression, going through what he describes as a nervous breakdown that lasted more than a year. “I was exhausted. He was malnourished. And there’s a virus that kills men who slept with dead men, some men I knew. Some of the men knew it very well,” he said. “Every time I had a rash or my glands would get swollen, every time I would get sick, I would think, ‘This is it. It’s HIV. ‘
“I flipped. I lost it. I was cuckoo,” Stipe continued. He’d go off on various jags, trying starvation diets, enemas, purging. He performed surgeries on himself in hotel rooms to remove worrying marks from his skin. That summer, he shaved his head for the first time and shaved his eyebrows off too. He gained 30 pounds. At a festival in Belgium, he wore a disposable razor instead of a necktie. Then, he went blind.
Stipe had neglected his touch lenses for several months to the point that he tore off his cornea. The band was leaving Europe to embark on an excursion along the West Coast. Stipe had to fly blindfolded, like a mummy, and was put into a wheelchair. his connection at Heathrow through his bandmates, who were all terrified and confused. During a layover in New York City, Stipe remembers eating a banana, but believes it was the only food he fed on for several days. He didn’t say much. He refused to take even an aspirin to relieve the pain.
I was slightly asleep. But upon arriving in Seattle, Stipe took a nap. And when he woke up, he was still able to take off his bandages. He looked out the window. He still remembers the way the sun hits the street. “Ten days in the dark didn’t do anything to me,” he recalls. He immediately wrote two lyrics, “I Believe” and “These Days,” to capture the dream he had just had and the determination he suddenly felt. “I was better. I felt new. I had a goal,” he said. “But it happened a few years later. “
It was Peter Buck who largely set the band’s pace. Buck told me: “I look at bands that are my contemporaries who, at some point, took a year off from recording and touring to go scuba diving. We didn’t know you could do that.” But it was also Buck who’d read all the cautionary tales in rock biographies and understood, from the outset, how to keep R.E.M. from tearing apart or burning out. This included splitting all songwriting credits equally, to short-circuit any quarrels about money, but also recognizing that the frontman in a band has a distinctly arduous job. And despite Stipe’s luminescent charisma onstage, aspects of the job didn’t come naturally to him. Buck understood that it was up to the other band members to help protect him and give him space to cope — not just because they loved Stipe but also because they wanted a long career.
By the time R.E.M. entered its epoch of megasuccess, beginning with the explosion of “Losing My Religion” in 1991, Stipe had learned to manage his limitations. Also, the culture had changed, and he had a lot more money; someone turned him on to acupuncture and massage and St. John’s wort, and it was easier for him to find healthful food on the road. But his celebrity was growing. The British press especially seemed determined to expose him as having AIDS, which he did not, and the media in general bumbled gracelessly around the question of his sexuality by tagging him with words like “enigmatic” or “mercurial.” In 1994, Stipe came out publicly as queer — a rarity in mainstream music at the time. In 2008, after his queerness randomly became news again, R.E.M. posted a video online in which Stipe read a stilted press release. He was there to announce, “after years of awkward speculation,” that the other members of R.E.M. were, in fact, straight. “I am happy for my bandmates and congratulate their candidness and their courage in making this bold statement,” he deadpanned.
Three years later, in 2011, R. E. M. Se parted ways amicably. It’s all over: no more touring. More adrenaline. No schedules. No stress. For nearly 32 years, Stipe was plugged into a specific outlet. Now I was disconnected, it was that undeniable. When asked via Rolling Stone if he was thinking about doing a solo album, he replied, “It’s for me right now. »
“I just folded my hands and sat for a while,” Stipe told me. Years passed. The journalists who still came sporadically to interview him would mention tallies of elapsed time — X number of years since the breakup; the 10-year anniversary of a particular album — and those numbers would catch him off guard: Had it really been that long?
Around 2015, Stipe stepped in to produce a record that his friends in the band Fischerspooner were struggling to finish. He, in turn, called in LeMaster as reinforcement, and while writing a song for the group, the two friends were astonished by the energy sparking between them. They decided to keep writing together, on their own. In 2019, Stipe started sporadically releasing singles, four of them over the course of five years, all to benefit climate groups. In 2020 he also collaborated with Aaron Dessner of the National, under the umbrella of Dessner’s side project, Big Red Machine, on a track called “No Time for Love Like Now.” Slowly, Stipe began feeling a deep compulsion to sing. The time had come, he told me, “to forge my own path with the Voice.”
“The Voice.” That’s how Stipe often refers to his own singing voice, an instrument that can range from gravelly and somber to a plaintive, nasal, belting cry — but is somehow always loaded with a startling density of emotion, blanketed in warmth. Calling it “the Voice” sounded to me a little pompous initially, but like “Face,” it stems from a private joke — a way for Stipe to put a buffer between himself and this other mysterious force. He insists it wasn’t until the last few years of R.E.M.’s career that he truly understood the distinctiveness of his own voice, and confessed at Electric Lady that he still doesn’t entirely comprehend “which version of the Voice people like. In a little bit of a calculated way, I try to figure it out. Like, ‘Well, these are the songs that people respond to, so which voice is that?’” Ultimately, the Voice feels like just another celebrity with whom he has a personal relationship, whose name drops into conversation from time to time.
He’s most proud of the way he’s learned to handle the Voice. Stipe has a knack for shaping his words to free them from their literal meaning, postponing them into natural emotion. You can sing lines like “You know, with love come strange coins. “/ And here is my call” to a stadium full of other people who will sing them all and for whom, in this alchemical moment, those words mean something vital, they mean everything, even if no one knows what they mean.
Initially, Stipe conceived of his voice only as a tool. He didn’t care about words; the confusing string of absurd phonemes he sang at the end of the first two R. E. M. albums set seemed like a valid approach. But he began to feel that he owed her the lyrics he could sing with conviction. We also owe it to the listeners. ” It’s evolved,” Mills said. “Over time, you no longer need to use your voice as a tool. You need to use your voice as voice and your words as a message. The message may still be opaque or impressionistic, but it will have to be fairly and scrupulously carried out. Stipe told me, “We’re machines brilliant enough that we can sense when something is genuine. “
With the visual arts his technique is freer, more impulsive. But words require rigor. “It’s your voice and your words, and it’s as naked and private as possible,” he said. This was the main obstacle for the new album. Stipe was daunted by the task of locating lyrics that suited a new musical taste, as well as his own perfectionism; he couldn’t bring himself to persist and write. By the end of that summer, having not played any music since the Electric Lady sessions in May, Stipe was worried that the songs were going stale (cultural adjustments come very quickly) or were starting to sound stale, even to him. He had a list of singers he was looking to collaborate with, but he didn’t have the lyrics to sing. One track had the current name “Disco2018”. “That was [expletive] five years ago!” —Stipe yelled. “Why didn’t I write anything about it?” In another case, he wrote a wonderful line – “Time helps me keep changing/reorganizing/me” – but he never came up with the next line. “So I’m stuck,” he said. “How does time replace and reorganize me? And it’s been a year already! After agonizing over all this one afternoon, in reaction to my questions, he nevertheless said: “It’s all just an excuse. This is part of what bothers me! I just have to finish it.
Unhelpful feedback loops were establishing themselves. His impostor syndrome seemed to be surging. He compared himself with other frontmen who’d started solo careers, like Thom Yorke, of Radiohead: “Thom’s doing so much. I feel like this slacker compared to him,” he said. “I’m at a point in my life where you start thinking, OK, I’ve got a great voice and people like it, and it does good things when I sing,” he said. “So what do I do with that, and why am I just frittering away my days not doing it?”
Stipe running without a record label, without a calendar, without a schedule other than his own. He stimulated through this lack of structure; He knew how much of the smugness he felt due to his previous life in the R. E. M. And he was sure that he didn’t need her anymore. And yet, because he had no limitations, he began to feel upset, flattened, constricted. One day in September, I was with him when he came across the word “dire wolf” on a plaque: the call of an extinct Pleistocene creature, new to him. Stipe paused to think about it. He may feel his attention fading: dire wolf, dire wolf, dire wolf. He took a picture of the words.
My brain got stuck, weighing the merit of speaking or not speaking. So I said it: there’s a Grateful Dead song called “Dire Wolf. “And Stipe, his body growing more and more flabby, said, “Ah,” and walked away quietly. I’d let the wolf go.
Stipe is a wonderful reader, but I’ve continually heard him mention a specific e-book to other people he knows. The e-book is called “Pretentiousness: Why It Matters. “
Its author, Dan Fox, strives to separate pretentiousness from the many disgusting things the word evokes, such as arrogance, self-centeredness, and snobbery. The claim itself is innocent, Fox claims; It has a root with “pretend. “To be immodest is to pretend to be bigger or more complicated than you, to “go beyond what you are capable of” until your talents catch up with you. In this sense, David Bowie was pretentious. John Lennon was pretentious. Fox asks us to believe how impoverished the world would be if each and every young art user were told that “it was pretentious for them to be interested in literature, music, theater, gardening, or design. “kitchen, so that they are only faithful to the circumstances. “that were born.
After hearing Stipe mention the ebook so many times, I read it, and when we reconnected last fall, I was excited to be able to talk about it with him. But right away, Stipe said, “I never finished the e-book, to be absolutely fair to you. “Talking about an ebook about pretentiousness that you never finished sounds incredibly pretentious, yet it gave that data unashamedly, which might be the least pretentious thing I’ve ever heard.
Either way, the premise appealed to Stipe. He liked to celebrate pretentiousness because pretentiousness had complicated his own life. From an early age, he identified that he had an uncanny compatibility with the general editing of his environment, even before he hit puberty and learned he was gay. Then, at the age of 15, he bought Patti Smith’s new record, “Horses,” stayed up all night listening to it while eating a huge bowl of cherries, threw up (because of all the cherries), and went off to school. . At some point in the night, Stipe made the decision that this was what he was going to do. Whatever world this music and that rare creature named Patti Smith came from, this was the world it belonged to. I just needed an organization to make that happen.
Twenty years later, in 1995, Stipe was on a year-long world tour with this band and was found in a bar in Spain drinking contraband wormwood. I also knew it would be Patti Smith’s first Valentine’s Day. without her husband, Fred (Sonic) Smith, the MC5 guitarist who had passed away a few months earlier at the age of 46. A tough day, for sure. He wondered if Patti Smith would appreciate a call.
But I knew someone who had his phone number and was on tour; That is to say, he was the edition of himself that he hummed, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with the audacity, courage and pretension that was demanded of him at every moment. at night on stage. It was as if he was running off a cliff as he called home in Detroit. And when Smith picked up the phone, he blurted out, “This is Michael Stipe. I wouldn’t call her if I wasn’t absolutely high on wormwood.
Here’s what you didn’t know:
The Smiths, Patti and Fred, didn’t pay much attention to new music. But Fred liked to record himself on MTV from time to time, and in the late ’80s, Patti filmed the video for R. E. M. for “The One I Love,” in which Stipe rests his head on the lap of a thin woman. The symbol reminded Smith of his historical relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; This made her feel like a charm for the singer on screen. When “Losing My Religion” dropped and Stipe seemed to be on MTV almost every single hour, Fred knew they had to call Patti from the other room. “He knew I had a big weight on Michael,” Smith told me. “Fred was yelling, ‘Trisha, your son is here!’
Now Smith’s husband was gone and her (impossible) son was on the phone, calling her only to tell her that he thought of her, what her music meant to him, that he hoped she was okay. A few months later, Stipe invited Smith to an R. E. M. show. in Michigan. ” I hadn’t been out of space much time after Fred’s death,” Smith told me. “And actually, not at a concert. I lived a very quiet life. Standing in the crowd as thousands chanted “The Man in the Moon,” she burst into tears.
Smith told the story at a dinner with Stipe one night in September. They were at a place to eat in Covington, Kentucky, across the Cincinnati River, where Smith was having a concert the next night. It was Fred Smith’s birthday: he would have been 75 years old. – and the weight of his loss and the joy of his memory seemed to mingle, coloring all night.
Watching Smith and Stipe together over the next couple of days, I found myself wishing the English language had words to capture all possible varieties of friendship, because theirs felt so specific. He doted on her, like a valet. She worried after him and took pleasure in poking a little fun. At dinner, Smith kept turning away to cough, and each time, Stipe would tactfully pass an open container of homeopathic lozenges across the table. When, during another meal, Stipe told the server: “I’m going to have the niçoise salad, but I’ll open with the buffalo mozzarella,” Smith chortled and teased: “Open with!” Then, when Smith left the room, Stipe turned to me, beaming, and said, “Isn’t she amazing?”
Smith was playing a festival in downtown Cincinnati organized and headlined by the National. For an hour, as the sun went down, she tramped around the stage in chunky black boots, mashing her pelvis into the air, into the music, while she spelled out “G-L-O-R-I-A.” And the whole time she was out there, being Patti Smith, Stipe watched from the side of the stage, in a “PATTI SMITH LOCAL CREW” T-shirt, being the world’s most energetic Patti Smith fan: snapping pictures, crossing and recrossing his arms as he bounded around to take her in from every possible angle. Later in the night, Smith reappeared to sing a song with the National but lost her grasp on the melody and timing momentarily. Walking off, she seemed slightly shellshocked, sapped of her superpowers, like a 76-year-old person for the first time all night. Stipe stepped forward to offer her a bottle of water. Smith whispered something to him, and he laughed, and there in the wings, washed in music, with the edges of the National’s stage lighting splashing over them, they stood still and hugged for a very long time.
El Nacional also asked Stipe to perform a song with them. But Stipe refused. He told me that he didn’t feel smart about his body (he was 15 pounds overweight, he said) and didn’t need to be photographed on stage. Stipe was one of The National’s musical heroes from a young age; The National’s bassist Scott Devendorf told me that when they were kids in Ohio, they discovered that R. E. M. He was from Georgia and not New York or Los Angeles. Then in 2008, the National opened for R. E. M. about what in the end was the group’s last excursion. They became friends with Stipe and benefited from his advice. (The National’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, described the album his band made after that excursion as “we’re all following Michael’s advice. “) The National’s Aaron Dessner told me, “I don’t want to be a fan, because we are friends”. But Dessner loves Stipe’s voice so much, he said, that simply paying attention to one Stipe voice note forces him to switch to paying attention to a bunch of R. E. M. notes.
Arms remained open when Stipe first arrived backstage that afternoon – a glorious blossoming of hugs. “How’s the music?” » Dessner asked. “Bored!” Stipe said. “I need this done. ” Dessner’s dual brother Bryce, who also plays at the National and is a classically trained composer, asked if Stipe was still interested in having him write string arrangements for the new songs. Stipe said yes, but his frame language became shy. “Send them to me and I’ll do it,” Bryce said firmly. He met Stipe’s eyes to indicate that he was serious; Stipe also deserves to take the offer seriously. Later that night, a few minutes after completing their two and a half hour set, the two brothers were in a corner of the green room, tending to Stipe and asking him if he wanted a beer, what kind of beer; asking him to tell them about his meeting Andy Warhol, if he had ever met Freddie Mercury, etc. Bryce pulled me away to show me a sleek, lightweight suit he was hanging in his suitcase. “I flew here in an Acne suit because I knew Michael would be there,” he said.
Throughout the evening it was palpable and comforting: affection and admiration also gathered around Smith, Stipe and the Dessners. It flowed in all directions, but most strongly upward, from the youngest to the oldest: a chain of influences embodied through friendships. In my opinion, it had something to do with the e-book about pretentiousness, with how other people – artists in particular, but not exclusively – exercise and reform as they age. Fifty years ago, Stipe turned to a symbol beyond the small square of truth in which he grew up. And he did it, he did it, while forging an identity that was indisputably his own. But now, with his solo album, he struggles to go beyond the limits of that truth, to succeed in anything else, anything. unknown that he can only locate within himself.
When I explained this theory to Stipe, it seemed to resonate. “Everyone here comes from a position they would rather disguise,” he said. He was quoting an R. E. M. song – quoting himself – but he wasn’t sure he remembered it exactly.
Stipe flew from Cincinnati to Athens, the college town where he and his family moved when he was a teenager and where Stipe still has a home. R.E.M. formed in Athens. Great rivers of R.E.M. lore rush under every inch of the city. Stipe narrated his site-specific memories as we drove around town.
Stipe’s mother and two sisters still live in Athens, as does his uncle. (His father died in 2015.) The family is extremely close and unrestrainedly loving. They stay in frequent touch throughout the day. One morning, on a FaceTime call with his mother, Marianne, Stipe got distracted by one of her shiny earrings and asked where she got it. “You gave it to me!” she said laughing, and he broke into laughter, too. “I think it’s lovely,” she said. “You’re going to keep trying to make me classy.”
“You’ve got class,” Stipe said.
“Well, I love my Michael,” his mother said, laughing and laughing.
“And I love my mom,” Stipe said and then they went mwah, mwah, mwah, blowing more kisses, and Stipe stayed a few seconds longer, making sure his mom found the right button to end the call.
One afternoon, Cyndy, Stipe’s sister, had arrived, and Marianne arrived playing three short horns: a family tradition, a code for the words “I love you. “He brought a homemade apple pie, which Stipe eagerly unwrapped for Mire, then whispered “Yes” just to himself. Marianne was worried that it wasn’t sweet enough. “”With apples,” he said, “it’s hard to predict. “
Marianne Stipe is 87, steady and serene, with the same ethereal blue eyes as her son. When strangers ask Mrs. Stipe if she knows Michael Stipe, she usually says, “I’ve heard of him,” she told me. But then she smiled in a way that, it seemed to me, would instantly give the secret away. When I asked if she’d heard any of Michael’s new music, she smiled again, and this smile kept expanding and expanding — until she pursed her lips and glanced at her son, unsure if she was allowed to say more.
Something had opened up for Stipe after Cincinnati. His inner climate was changing. It had been years since I’d noticed live music, and it’s certainly not like I was backstage with friends. “It was familiar to him in a really welcoming and encouraging way,” she said. He felt that a certain specialized sensory reminiscence revived. His body knew precisely how to get over the wires, precisely when to leave the dressing room so the band could have some time in combination before going on stage. “I don’t know if ‘melancholy’ is the right word,” Stipe said. It was a twinge of excitement that made me miss him. “Longing” is the word. It never goes away, but it hits you in the face.
He woke up the next day with words in his head (rhyming words) and scribbled them in his notebook. Then, while listening to some of his new songs at the LeMaster Studio in Athens, he had to leave the room to write others. The words were awful, he said, but that was what his brain generated, and he had to honor that to allow the muscle to exercise freely again. “I don’t have to be afraid,” he said.
Over the next few days, in Athens, I saw broadcast in real time what a Hollywood film can simply condense into montage. Stipe insisted on taking long walks every night to lose weight. He checked his pulse. Once, when he came out of space, he spontaneously sang a line from the national song “Fake Empire,” one of the only times I heard him sing.
You could feel him hurtling toward the unpleasant thing he’d been resisting. He knew he’d have to isolate himself in one of the buildings on his property, walk in circles for six or eight or 10 hours at a time, effect a trancelike meditation and wrench out the rest of the lyrics, line by line. That’s how he’d always done it, ever since his blindness episode. He turned his body into a fidget spinner so his mind could do the work.
“Now I have a deadline,” he announced to his mother and sister. Although he was pleased to be free of the stressors he had felt with R. E. M. , he told them, without any pressure, “Maybe I’ll keep releasing this record for a decade and let my insecurities get the best of me. “about me. ” He was making plans to see a friend later that year, he explained: a famous musician who had given him four tracks to turn into songs for his album. But more than a year had passed, and the friend still hadn’t heard a finished musical note in return. Stipe assumed his friend was curious, maybe even worried. “But he’s gentlemanly enough not to ask. ” So Stipe tried to give him one or two of those songs when they saw each other, with the lyrics. “I’m using this as a deadline,” he told his mother and sister, “to force me to go by the house next door and go around in circles and write some damn letters. “
Marianne sat in front of him with ideal composure, stating with an undeniable gesture that she accepted as inevitable what her son said to her. Words arose, as did the sun and moon. “It will be easy,” his mother said.
He met his deadline.
But to prevent it would be misleading and unfair. Because, Stipe said to me the other day, “I’m out of my terrible writer’s block. After that, I absolutely blossomed as a writer. He was almost done with two of those songs and added “Time Keeps Changing. “”He had been carrying pages of letters with him for days.
“We can say for the song that I’ve edited the songs and, through God, I’ll make them before the song comes out,” he said. “What’s up with this? Let’s let the song end with: I’m done. “the songs.
Jon Mooallem has been a contributing writer for the magazine for nearly two decades. He is the author of three books: “Wild Ones,” about looking at people looking at animals; “This Is Chance!” on the 1964 Alaska earthquake; and “Serious Face,” which included a decade’s worth of Times Magazine articles. This is his last feature before he assumes a position as obituary and features writer for The Wall Street Journal. Christopher Anderson is the author of nine books of photography, including “Odyssey,” published last month. He lives in Paris.
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