World Leader Pretend, 1988



Michael Stipe is always, well, Stipeish. Meaning: particular, individual, unexpected. When he submits his eight favourite REM songs for this feature, there is not one from the first six albums (and none from 1992’s Automatic for the People, the album he is ostensibly promoting for its deluxe reissue). After the Guardian suggests it might be nice to have the 1980s represented, Stipe relents, and includes World Leader Pretend, from 1988’s Green.

“It was the first song I felt so confident about that we printed the lyric on the sleeve, allowing people to read it before they heard it,” Stipe tells me a few days later, in a London hotel. “I realised it was my take on Leonard Cohen. I was trying to be as smart as he was in his lyric writing.” The band had formed in 1980, “so you could say it was eight years in the making”, he adds.

Being in REM through the 80s meant growing up in public, Stipe says. It also meant learning what being in a group entailed. “I didn’t know the bass player made the low notes until the second album – I was that naive about music and how it’s made.” By the time of Green, the slightly nerdy group from Athens, Georgia, had become stars, and the intensely shy Stipe had to change the way he worked, especially live. “We didn’t have LED screens, so I started dressing in brighter clothes on stage. I started allowing gestures to be larger, which I wouldn’t in the early 80s because I thought it was fake and stupid and popstarish.”

Country Feedback, 1991



In 1991, the album Out of Time made REM internationally famous, and Stipe gained something in the process: “Just a degree of confidence, for someone who is wobbly and insecure.” Although he thinks he was a better writer by this time, with Country Feedback a prime example, Stipe noted himself falling prey to songwriting vices he preferred to eschew. “I allowed sentimentality to creep in, which is something I really run away from. I don’t like cheesy, maudlin, overly sincere.”

Out of Time also came in the middle of REM’s retreat from touring – after completing the campaign for Green, they stayed off the road until after Monster was released in 1994. “We had done 10 years of touring. I was tired, adrenalised to my eyeballs and skinny as a rail. In 1989, we went around the world three times. My haircut during that tour should indicate my state of mind: it was the four worst haircuts of the 1980s combined into one.”

Strange Currencies, 1994



During REM’s time off the road, Stipe’s low profile led to rumours about his health – notably, that he had Aids. The sombre mood of Drive, the lead single from Automatic for the People, only fed them. But when Monster came out in 1994, it seemed as if it was by a different group entirely.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The classic REM lineup: guitarist Peter Buck, singer Michael Stipe, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. Photograph: Santiago Bueno/Sygma via Getty Images

“It was our version of rock music,” Stipe says. “U2 had come out with Achtung Baby, where they had allowed themselves to become theatrical; there was an element of that. Grunge had happened, and there was something very freeing in that as well. So we went for something completely different, something more circus-like and over the top. It was glam rock, basically. It was going back to T Rex and Mott the Hoople and pulling it forward into where grunge was, post-Achtung Baby. Those are movements and records that really impacted me, and made me think: Who are we within all this? The landscape has shifted, and where do we stand?”

Strange Currencies came from Stipe’s ascension into rock royalty: it was inspired by Michael Hutchence of INXS. “He raised the bar for both myself and Bono. The middle eight of that is completely taken from INXS and from Michael. He was such an amazing rock star. I’m really a little embarrassed by the term rock star. When I met Andy Warhol, he called me a pop star. I said: ‘No I’m the singer in a band.’ He said: ‘No, you’re a pop star.’ ‘No, I’m not.’ OK, well, he won. As it turned out, I’m a pretty good pop star. I’m not a very good rock star – I don’t have the voice for it. I think it’s an odd thing to reach for, to be a rock star.”

The Lifting, 2001



REM’s drummer, Bill Berry, left the band in 1997, and they continued as a trio of Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills. Buck, in particular, was troubled by the change. “Peter has the kind of personality that if he’s not happy and he’s in the room with you, it just kind of brings everything down,” Stipe says. “He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and one of the most silent people, so you never really knew what was happening inside his brain. It’s easy for that to prey on your insecurities. Had we had that conversation at the time, had he said: ‘I feel alone because Bill was the one who was always on time’ …” Stipe’s voice trails off. “But we didn’t have that conversation.”

Reveal, REM’s 12th album – released in 2001 – opened with The Lifting. In cinematic mood, Stipe wrote the song as a prequel to Daysleeper from the previous album, Up, about a downtrodden middle manager unable to sleep at night. In The Lifting, she was seeking help, Stipe says. The song is about her visiting a facility “where they lock you in a room for a weekend and you have to sit crosslegged and you’re not allowed to go to the bathroom. You give control to someone else who is trying to break you down so they can build you up again. Kind of ridiculous.

“When I realised I had written Daysleeper from the perspective of a woman, I had to challenge my own sense of feminist positioning,” he continues. “Why did I write this insanely vulnerable character as a woman? I had to examine that.”

Electron Blue, 2004



The original longlist of songs Stipe gave to the Guardian for this feature contained three from Around the Sun. That seemed odd, because it is probably REM’s least loved album. “I don’t know which songs are on which record,” Stipe says, noting that he had forgotten Man on the Moon was on Automatic for the People until last year. By 2004, when Around the Sun was released, the status REM held in the early 90s had vastly diminished. How did that feel? “Not good. Because when you’re at the top you feel like it’s going to go on for ever. To not realise, you feel like such a dum-dum. It’s a hard lesson. I now tell people: ‘Enjoy the moment. Be right there.’”

Around the Sun’s recording was interrupted by REM having to compile a best-of. “Peter became very frustrated with the amount of time it took to make the record. By the time it came out, he was done with it. He didn’t like it any more. The live versions have much more energy; they’re faster, they’re probably better.” Electron Blue, Stipe says, is about “a drug dealer who sells a man a drug made of light. It captured the narrative and the sense of isolation of that character; it’s one of my dream songs.”

Supernatural Superserious, 2008



In 2008, REM made Accelerate, a record that sounded like the REM people had fallen in love with in the 1980s. It was granted the phrase “return to form” by reviewers. “None of the albums are bad,” Stipe says. “Our worst records, we just shot ourselves in the foot – it was usually internal stuff that was happening.” Sometimes, the three members just couldn’t agree on what an REM song was: “Everything gets run through me, so they had frustrations about things that never got recorded or turned into songs, and I got frustrated by being given songs with chord progressions that were impossible to write to.”

Accelerate, to an outsider at least, sounded like Buck’s album, guitars jangling. “We always wanted to make a rock record. I’m not sure we ever quite achieved that,” Stipe says. “Accelerate is a bit brittle, to my ear, but in an exciting way.” Supernatural Superserious is about personal transformation, and both the freedom and pain that comes with it. He says it’s one of his favourite REM songs – “I loved the character, I loved the narrative, I loved how fucking twisted it is” – but the album as a whole did something REM had never done before, namely respond to how the world was perceiving them. “It was a reaction to Around the Sun. I never wanted to react, but there it is, you wind up reacting.”

Oh My Heart, 2011



As with The Lifting and Daysleeper, Oh My Heart – from the final REM album, Collapse Into Now – was a song that was part of a pair, with Houston, from Accelerate. In Houston, the narrator was heading west from New Orleans to escape Hurricane Katrina; in Oh My Heart he is going back home to help rebuild the city.

Geography and a sense of place has always mattered to Stipe, not just for his writing, but in his life. “When people remind me of something, I have to stop and say: ‘Give me the city first.’ I am not on the [autistic] spectrum, but the way my brain organises things is different from regular people: give me the place and my recall improves by 200%. Maybe that comes from travelling as much as I did as a child with my father [who was in the army] and my mother. Maybe it comes from being in a band, and always picking up and moving on.”

We All Go Back to Where We Belong, 2011



REM announced their end in 2011, and this was one of three previously unheard tracks that featured on a compilation that tied in with their split. “We had fulfilled our contract and it had become evident to us that it was time to either let it devolve into silliness, which none of us wanted, or make the difficult decision of walking away from it on our own terms and let that be that. And then spend the rest of our lives saying, ‘No, we are not going to reform, no, there’s not going to be a return concert or a tour.’ Some guy said to me last night at a cocktail party: ‘I book things for private parties. How much money would it take to put the band together for three songs? No one would ever know about it.’ I said: ‘There’s not enough money in the world.’ And he said: ‘Thank you – I’m a huge fan, and I wanted to know you couldn’t be bought.’ And I thought, that’s cool, and that’s manipulative, and fuck you. As much as we love each other and love what we did, it just shouldn’t happen.”

Michael Stipe has curated a longer primer to the band’s work, featuring the above alongside other favourite tracks from across his career; you can listen and subscribe to it in Spotify. The deluxe reissue of Automatic for the People is out now on Craft Recordings.