In early March, we sat down at his kitchen counter in downtown New York City over sushi to talk about his career.

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: You’re considered one of Georgia’s native sons. But in reality, you grew up on army bases all around the country, didn’t you?

MICHAEL STIPE: I was born in Georgia. That’s where my grandparents-and all my people-are from. But my family traveled a great deal because my dad was in the army as a helicopter pilot.

Bollen: How did music first get into the ears of an army kid?

I came out of the free-swinging ’60s and ’70s. It was free love, baby. So it’s insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, ‘what happened? Where’s my future?’ Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters. Suddenly, Reagan is in office, I’m 21 years old, and you can die from fucking.Michael StipE

Stipe: Music really started when I read about the CBGB scene in New York in a magazine called Rock Scene. And then I accidentally got a subscription to The Village Voice when I was 14.

Bollen: Accidentally?

Stipe: It was one of those things that existed in the ’70s that was basically like Columbia House. You send them a dime and you get 12 albums for free-only this was for magazines.

Bollen: Ironically, Columbia House was how I got most of my R.E.M. CDs when I was a kid. I had multiple subscriptions under different names to get as many 12-free-CD shipments as possible.

Stipe: Yeah, well, those magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith. This was in a town outside of East St. Louis, in Illinois, where I was living at the time. To them it was laughable. They ordered it, but they couldn’t have cared less.

Bollen: What happened when you brought Horses home?

Stipe: I sat up all night with my headphones on, listening to it over and over again, while eating a giant bowl of cherries. In the morning I threw up and went to school.

Bollen: [laughs] So Horses led you to bulimia.

Stipe: [laughs] Actually, that was several years later. But I knew right then at age 15 what I wanted to do with my life.

Bollen: You didn’t have any formal training as a singer at that point, did you?

Stipe: No. It didn’t even occur to me. The punk-rock ethos was “Do it yourself. Anyone can do this. We’re not sent from the heavens.” At the time, in 1975, rock stars seemed like these other creatures to me. But the whole point of the punk-rock thing was that “We’re not special. We just have a voice.” You don’t need to be talented. You don’t even have to play the guitar to be a guitar player in a punk-rock band. So I, in a very naïve and teenage way, said, “That’s it. I’m going to be in a band.”