Latest Michael Stipe Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The song "Sing for the Submarine" presents my dream world, which is way different from my waking world. It's set in the future and it's post-apocalyptic.

  Michael Stipe

  Dream, Song, Different

  Source: pitchfork.com

• 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.

  Michael Stipe

  Together, Kind, Rhyme

  Source: pitchfork.com

• Be yourself. Follow your heart. I know it sounds obvious, but it's the best advice at anyone ever. Take advice from other people, but take from it what feels right for you.

  Michael Stipe

  Being Yourself, Heart, People

  Source: thequietus.com

• Anything you do as a group is fraught with compromise... But everyone 's got to do that, right? It's part of being a good parent, or a good boyfriend, whatever.

  Michael Stipe

  Parent, Compromise, Good Parent

  Source: thequietus.com

• 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.

  Michael Stipe

  Mean, People, Giving

  Source: thequietus.com

• 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.

  Michael Stipe

  Fall, Vision, Band

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Michael Stipe

  Mistake, Looks, Done

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.

  Michael Stipe

  Art, Black And White, Rocks

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• When I hear music as a fan, I see fields. I see landscapes. I close my eyes and see an entire universe that that music and the voice, or the narrative, create. A music video-and any other kind of visual reference-is created by someone else.

  Michael Stipe

  Eye, Voice, Fans

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Song, Powerful, Mtv

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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, Substance, Levels

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I was doing that [a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.

  Michael Stipe

  Guy, Trying, Collaboration

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Michael Stipe

  Daughter, Doors, Two

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• When we signed with Warner Bros., they knew what they were getting. They knew they weren't going to get some easily manipulated prepackaged pop group. That was not going to happen. What they wanted, I think, was the integrity that we had to offer. What they wanted was the kind of street cred or cache that R.E.M. could bring to them and the chance that we would give them a hit or two. What happened was we gave them a bunch of hits. And we became huge.

  Michael Stipe

  Integrity, Thinking, Two

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Michael Stipe

  Sex, Crazy, Sick

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I was vulnerable every day. Every night that I stepped on stage I was laying myself open.

  Michael Stipe

  Night, Vulnerable, Stage

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

  Michael Stipe

  Mind, Records, Difficult Times

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I distinctly remember a conversation with my band in the van where I was having a complete meltdown. It was 1984, I think, and I was huddled in the back corner of our van and saying, "I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this." I didn't want to play any more shows. I just wanted to stop.

  Michael Stipe

  Thinking, Play, Band

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've never written a song that's hopeless. I'm not a hopeless person. I'm crazily optimistic. I crazily see the good in people. I crazily see the way out of a terrible situation. I crazily try to be the diplomat. If there are two warring factions in my life, I want them to agree to disagree at the very least.

  Michael Stipe

  Song, Optimistic, Two

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Joy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.

  Michael Stipe

  Sex, Real, Teenager

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I don't find R.E.M. to be nihilistic. There is a constant undertone of joyous optimism. I'm not going to kill myself to Patti Smith or R.E.M.

  Michael Stipe

  Optimism, Joyous, Constant

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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?"

  Michael Stipe

  Baby, Sex, Gay

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com