By accident rather than design, Michael Stipe and I are talking 10 years to the day since REM announced they were splitting up.
erhaps inevitably, the REM singer is weighing up what it all meant. At 61, Stipe has reached the point where the band “was exactly one half of my life”.
“That’s pretty wild,” he says. “It took me 20 years to prepare for REM and a decade to be able to reflect back and feel really good about it, and be really proud of the legacy that we left. I’m proud that we exited of our own volition, in a way that I think was extremely graceful and gentlemanly.”
Speaking on Zoom from his house in REM’s hometown of Athens, Georgia, Stipe is fine company: polite, engaged, thoughtful and drily humorous. Pleasingly, the gift for eccentric phrase-making — “180pc”; “a giant, universe-sized steam shovel” — which made him such a compelling lyricist has not deserted him.
The past is present, but doesn’t hang heavy. Stipe seems happy that REM remains part of his life, yet has no regrets that it no longer requires active service.
“It was really one of the hardest things we ever had to do, both as individuals and as a group, but we made the right choice and I’m really glad that we did it,” he says of the decision to split shortly after the release of their last album, Collapse Into Now. “We wanted to go out on a high note, and I think we did. We didn’t drive it into the ground.”
Since “retiring”, Stipe has published two books of photography. His musical output has amounted to a handful of low-key song releases and the odd live cameo. In terms of REM, the job is now one of careful curation, overseeing deluxe reissues of their albums. The latest is New Adventures in Hi-Fi, originally released in September 1996 and now celebrating its 25th birthday with a handsomely expanded re-release featuring demos, live tracks and alternate versions.
Throughout the process, Stipe was hands-on. “I’m a bit of a control freak, that’s putting it lightly, so I was steering the whole package. We wanted to present little trails of breadcrumbs for people who like to really deep dive into the work. It’s all there.”
The mid-90s was a febrile time for REM. Early in the decade, the greatest American rock band of its generation had shucked off the last vestiges of cult status with the global success of Losing My Religion, followed by the multimillion-selling Automatic for the People. These sombre songs of loss sent REM into the stratosphere. During this period the band stopped touring and began to scatter. Spending a lot of time in New York, Stipe was feeling the strain. So, like generations of American settlers before him, he headed west.
“New York felt very tired to me in the early 90s, very worn out,” he says. “New York really took a hit with Aids, and as my second home it was a really difficult place to be for a while. I just saw too much there, I went through too much and experienced too much. I needed distance, and Los Angeles provided that for me. My best friend had moved to a beach hut off the Pacific Ocean and had a spare room, and so I moved base for a couple of years.”
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The geographical shift is evident on New Adventures in Hi-Fi. If REM’s early records are suffused with the spirit of the American south, New Adventures… is a song of the west.
American west
“LA provided me with a whole new area of interest in terms of observation,” Stipe says. “That’s really what I do as writer. I mean, I only write pop lyrics, but I observe. Sometimes I stare for too long and it makes people upset, but I watch people. Living there, I was able to absorb the American west in a way that I never had before.”
Songs such as How the West was Won and Where it Got Us and Low Desert contemplated “the cultural, intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the west; the history of it, and the tragedy of it”.
The title of Electrolite, one of the great happy- sad REM songs, references “a view of Los Angeles at night”.
“Looking out from the hills, or down from an airplane, it’s like a blanket made of electrolyte. LA is ultimately one of the most isolating places on earth. It’s certainly the most isolating place I’ve ever been,” Stipe says. “It’s built into the cultural fabric of being a single-industry town.”
In 1994, REM had returned to their guitar-band roots with the glam and grunge-influenced Monster. Touring for the first time in six years, they resolved to write and record the next album of new material on the road — at soundchecks, in dressing rooms and even during shows. Travelling with a mobile recording truck, the aim was to capture a snapshot of a band in motion, evoking the blur and dislocation of a rootless life. While the musicians worked on musical ideas, Stipe was elsewhere.
“I was rarely at soundchecks,” he says. “I was more likely to be at a museum or exploring the town. When we were touring, I was 180pc completely focused on performing, keeping myself so that my voice worked that night. That required a lot of head space, it didn’t really leave a lot of room for lyric writing.
“We did write and try out some songs on that tour, but it was not, for me, a time of creating. I would write ideas down, but nothing much came. I could find melodies, and I was there at some of those soundchecks, but it was really the guys testing those songs and coming up with arrangements and layers to add later in the studio.”
After the tour, REM entered a studio proper with producer Scott Litt to finish the record. This was when Stipe “was able to sit down with the work”. “It was rolling around in my head the whole time,” he says.
He instinctively knows, he says, when a lyric is right. “I don’t feel the need to struggle with my work. Often the work that you don’t struggle with turns out to be the better work. When you have to really work on a lyric, that usually indicates trouble.”
One of his favourite songs on New Adventures…, New Test Leper, “went through eight different themes before I landed on the right one, and it came so easily that it was written in the time it takes to listen to the song”.
On release, the album received a relatively muted reception. Both critics and fans, says Stipe, were confused by the on-the-road concept.
“It sunk the record. People thought that it was a live album, rather than new songs that we’d just recorded. With the PR around that record, we might have done a better job.”
It was, you suspect, an album consciously designed to slow REM’s commercial trajectory. Raw and unpolished, at 65 minutes New Adventures… is the band’s longest record. Its cover depicts a blurred monochrome image of a desertscape. For the lead single, they chose E-Bow the Letter, a dark, churning thing featuring Stipe’s muttered vocal coupled with a howling Patti Smith.
“Choosing E-Bow the Letter effectively tanked the possibility of us having a hit single,” he says. “But we knew what we were doing. We chose this radical non-radio song because we knew that radio would have to play it, because we were in a position of power, and MTV would have to show it.
“We were pushing the limits of what was acceptable in pop culture and we did it very actively and purposefully. I’m glad that we did, but it effectively tanked the album. It didn’t receive much of a fanfare, certainly in our native country.”
Critical status
“Tanking” is a relative concept. New Adventures… certainly struggled in America, but it sold six million copies worldwide and reached number one in a dozen countries, including Ireland. Its critical status, meanwhile, has steadily grown. Among its fans are Thom Yorke; according to Stipe, the album contains many of the Radiohead singer’s favourite REM songs.
“Thom really loves E-Bow the Letter and Electrolite, and Be Mine, which he sang with us once in Washington DC,” he laughs. “And that guy has got really good taste, by the way!”
Stipe also rates the record. “It was my favourite REM album for the longest time, then it got bumped by Reveal — I think Reveal is really stunning. I can shoot holes through everything we ever did, or everything that I’ve ever done, but New Adventures… does remain among my favourite albums that we released. I can stand back and see that it has one good or great song after another — a few of them are a little too long, but that’s OK. It holds together as a piece. It represents the time it was made, not just for us but also that moment in US pop culture.”
It may have tapped into the late-90s zeitgeist, but New Adventures in Hi-Fi also mapped out a new future for the band. It was the last REM album to feature drummer Bill Berry, while the final track, Electrolite, with its parting shot — “I’m out of here” — recognised, says Stipe, “the need to step out of the 20th and into the 21st century. At the end, the protagonist is really saying: ‘I’m done with this, I’m moving on and into a more progressive and more utopian future’.”
Spoken like a man who long ago realised the value of living in the now, and not the then.
‘New Adventures in Hi-Fi Deluxe (25th anniversary)’ is released on November 12
