The 63-year-old Decatur, Georgia-born cerebral songwriter and frontman for the Athens-formed rock group R.E.M. is known for songs like “Losing My Religion” and “Shiny Happy People.” Capable of delving into music that shakes your spirit or enlivens your mind, Stipe and the group were a movement in the 1980s and 1990s as much as any other band.
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But though R.E.M. hung it up before many of their fans would have liked, their legacy lasts today, thanks to iconic songs and recent appearances in the popular television show, The Bear. But with all this adulation, one may wonder what Stipe had to say about his craft and the world at large outside of his songs.
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Well, dear reader, that is the subject of today’s inquiry. So, without further ado, here below are the best 20 Michael Stipe quotes.
1. “My feeling is that labels are for canned food… I am what I am—and I know what I am.”
2. “But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we’re very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do.”
3. “I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.”
4. “I’m tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.”
5. “My iPod that was programmed by Peter Buck. It has 7,000 songs hand-picked for me by him.”
6. “Super casual music listeners. That’s most of the people in the world. And you have to understand, that’s why Top 40 radio exists. It’s not there for people who seek out music and who love music.”
7. “We made part of [a] record in Miami, and I would go down to the beach, and not 20 feet from the water I see a fish that is at least seven feet long swimming close to the shore. I did not go back in the ocean the entire month.”
8. “We’re absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That’s part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we’re such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we’re not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.”
8. “So, we just kind of created our own thing and that’s part of the beauty of Athens: is that it’s so off the map and there’s no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.”
9. “Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It’s equally humbling and uplifting.”
10. “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.”
11. “Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.”
12. “Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.”
13. “I’m just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I’ve written about.”
14. “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.”
15. “I really wanted to be on Six Feet Under as a corpse. That would be hysterical.”
16. “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.”
17. “I’ve always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.”
18. “So, when you divide the world into music lovers, music fans and then those people who are just very casual about their music, it’s wallpaper to them, it’s elevator music, it’s just the thing that’s playing in the background that helps them through their day.”
19. “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.”
20. “There was a point in the ’80s when I looked out at my audience and I saw people that – were I not on the stage—they’d sooner slug me as they walked by me on the sidewalk. And I realized that I was way beyond the choir.”
Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
