Michael Stipe Quotes
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I stopped taking drugs [in 1983]. There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn't cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, "That's it," so I quit then. It was horrible.
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We don't get groupies.We get teenagers who want to read us their poetry.
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For every great thing we did, there is a very public moment of falling on our faces. But everything that came through us as a band was a distinct vision of R.E.M.
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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.
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The whole point of the punk-rock thing was that "We're not special. We just have a voice."
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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.
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The only thing to fear is fearlessness.
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I started lip-synching with "Losing My Religion." There were a few horrendous mistakes we made, but I own those mistakes. I'm embarrassed by them. I always say when I look back at anything I've ever done, it's with equal dollops of humiliation and triumphant glory.
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By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?"
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A wise man once said, 'The skill in attending a party is knowing when it's time to leave.'
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Once I reached my 40s, I thought to myself that if I'm going to play live now, I need to really mean this. I can't go out and be a little bit, for one moment slovenly in my choices as a performer. I mean, these people have paid a lot of money to be here, they've been through the nightmare of getting here, starving themselves waiting for us to get on stage, so I'm going to give them what they came here for.
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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.
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AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the '80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex.
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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.
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My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.
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To be called an elder statesman is so unbelievably insulting. Brad Pitt is exactly three years younger than me.
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Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.
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I remember traffic jams Motor boys and girls with tans Nearly was and almost rans I remember this, this ... At the edge of the continent
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On planes I always cry. Something about altitude, the lack of oxygen and the bad movies. I cried over a St. Bernard movie once on a plane. That was really embarrassing.
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Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters.
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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.
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I was vegetarian, trying to eat from fast-food restaurants without meat. I didn't know how to eat properly and I was starving. I was adrenalized to the eyeballs from performing. I was afraid that I was sick with AIDS. We were playing five shows a week. I even went through a period of abstinence where I didn't drink and stopped having sex. Which is crazy. Maybe I'm answering too many questions at once here, but this is where my mind was at the age of 25.
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There are people that very strongly identify themselves as gay and then lesbian, and then I think there are a lot of people who are kind of some percentage or some version of that.
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There tend to be two different drives that lead young people toward music. One is that music provides an escape; it takes you away from the unhappiness or torture of where you are and makes you feel less alienated-you believe there is a place you fit in somewhere else. The other is a sort of transcendent, spiritual feeling in the purity of music.