Pushkin. Hey y'all, Today we have a conversation between old friends Rick Rubin and Michael Stipe. Along with this former Georgia based band RM, Stipe helped to popularize what was once called alternative music. With his open, arted lyrics. Stipe gave voice to the sensitive and misunderstood among us with hits like the One I Love, Everybody Hurts, and Losing My Religion. On today's episode, Michael plays Rick a new song of his called Future If Future, produced by Andy LeMaster. The song, as he explains, was released in partnership with Earth Percent, which gives artists a simple way to support groups fighting climate change, something Stipe cares deeply about. Michael Stipe also talks about the upcoming solo album he's recording and how he always intended to be super famous and then what it was like when it actually happened. This is broken record, line of notes, but a digital age. I'm justin mission. Here's Rick Rubin and Michael Stipe. Hello. Rick, it has been a very long time since I've seen you, and you look great. You too. How long have you lived in New York? It depends on which government agency you talked to, but I've been here since nineteen eighty seven, I see, do you ever go back to Georgia. I spent most of lockdown in Georgia with my mother, my sisters, and a few very close my family. I had some vulnerable people in my family, so I spent most of lockdown there, and then starting last summer summer of twenty one, was able to travel to our home in Berlin because I now lived between New York and Berlin, and then and then came back when things got bad again with a delta. When you're in Georgia, is that at home, in the house that you grew up in? No, that's a misnomber that I grew up in Georgia. My father was in the army, so I traveled my whole life with him. He was in Vietnam twice, he was in Korea once during my lifetime, and we would pick up and move every couple of years. So I was born in Georgia. I returned to Georgia when I was eighteen because my father retired. He and my mom moved to Athens because there's a college there that my uncle went to. He was this great he is this incredible activist and spent the sixties and seventies in Athens as an activist at the University of Georgia. My mom and dad liked the sound of it, and so they moved there in nineteen seventy eight when I was eighteen, and I followed them. I was living with a punk rock band in Granite City, Illinois, and I ran out of money and I moved with my tail between my legs. I moved to Athens, Georgia, thinking that it was a hippie cowtown and that I didn't fit in because I was just, you know, urban punk rocker. And it turns out that one of the most incredible punk rock scenes in America was happening right under my nose in Athens, Georgia, and I became a part of it. Unbelievable. What are the odds of that being the case. It's just a remarkable You would never guess it. Also that it would be, you know, the band that kicked it off, of course, of the B fifty twos. And that's a band, in my opinion, that had yet gotten their due recognition for the degree to which they altered the trajectory of contemporary music. Who with other bands in the Athens scene at that time, like post B fifty two's pre Rim, what was that window Brim would include the Method Actors and Pylon and that's about it. With Rim came a band called the Side Effects, and then a couple of other bands. There was a whole scene going on in Atlanta, but there's always been this weird thing like San Bernardino, La County kind of thing between Atlanta and Athens. There was a band called Vietnam. There there was a Ruphole's early band Ruphol and Weipole, a band called the Now Explosion, and that was They were all really fun people and we would hang out with them from time to time, but it was really Athens had its own thing going on. A lot of that had to do with Jeremy Arrows, my mentor the first really the first love of my life in a way, and he had moved from Athens where he grew up, to New York became involved in Andy Warhol's factory as a drag queen named silver Then, who Andy loved, but Paul Morrissey, who made all the movies, didn't like very much. Anyway. Andy really hung onto Silva until Jeremy decided to move back to Athens, and then he was really profoundly involved in the beginnings of the B fifty twos and helped kind of set the stage for what Athens would become as this like hotbed of new music. What was your first memory of the punk rock world in the United States? So we're not including sex pistols, We're not including like your first US experience of punk rock? What was it? Well, it predates the sex pistols. I was sent attention in high school in nineteen seventy five, and under my desk where I sat, someone had left a torn up copy of Cream magazine and there was an article written by Lisa Robinson about CBGB, and she was comparing the CBGB scene to as a black and white, scratchy TV to the technicolor, bloviating, bloated rich were better than everyone else kind of rock scene that was happening in modern America and saying, this is so much more real and so much more raw, and so much cooler, and these are the people involved in it. And there was a photograph of Patti Smith and she looked for all the world like, you know, like a vampire black and white picture. She's got her eyes wide open and I saw the picture and I was like, these are my people. And I read the article and I was like, this is it? So I wound up accidentally subscribing to the Village Voice. My sister had one of those Columbia House subscriptions where you paid a dime and you could get ten magazines for free, and the Village Voice just sounded like fun. So she asked me to pick a few magazines and I picked that one, and suddenly I was immersed into the whole CBGB scene and I started following it. And I bought Patti's first album the day that it came out, when I was fifteen years old, and I decided then and there that I was going to become a singer in a band and that was going to be my life. And I naively moved forward with that, and I outrageously and very luckily I was succeeded at it. It's unbelievable. It's a beautiful story. And was what was your experience of music prior to the punk rock experience? Did you love music from young childhood or no. I loved music, but I was only exposed really to pop radio, and the five years that are kind of probably most significant to me or the years that we spent in Texas. We had moved from Frankfort. Outside of Frankfort, Germany, where there was pop radio, but it was all German, so it was like the Beatles singing Michel Mabel in German. I distinctly remember that as a child standing in a cabbage garden, if you can believe it, it was very German in nineteen sixty seven and moving as a seven or eight year old to Texas and then hearing pop radio which included Tammy Wynette and a lot of country music, but then also the Archies and the Banana Splits and whatever. You know. The Flintstones were primetime TV at that point during the Vietnam War. Yeah, my exposure to pop radio during those those years between sixty seven and seventy three, that was really primo amazing radio in terms of music that I really clocked as as a young team. I always cite rock On by David Essex, which I then kind of extrapolated into the song drive by RIM's. It's a very very That whole album in fact, is really referencing the nineteen seventies and the song by song you can go to everybody Hurts is Nazareth the band Nazareth Guy that covers Love Hurts, which was an earlier song from I think the nineteen fifties or sixties. Drive was my homage to David Essex and rock On. The other song that I always name is my now very very very dear friend and a man who I love very much. But Elton John put up bidding in the Jets and I had never heard anything like that before. It was absolutely mind blowing to me that the production it was really and I'm talking to you about this, but it was really the production. The song is a great song, and he's of course an amazing artist, but the production of the song was so whacked out. In the production of rock On by David Essex was so whacked out. But I think that was coming out of well, you know, what was happening with the glam rock in England, early kind of Mark Bowland, very early David Bowie, Slade, the Basicity Rollers might have come a little bit later, and they were very pop of course, but I think a lot of that production stuff was coming from there. So after you saw the picture of Patty, did you go to find her? Is that? Is that? The next step. You went to New York. That was what drew you. I did not go to New York for another three years. I didn't actually meet Patty until twenty years later. Wow, nineteen ninety five that we actually met each Incredible, incredible. We can continue from nineteen seventy nine when I first came to New York. But um, you and I go back a long long way, and we all have our past that are maybe a little bit embarrassing. But I know that you used to spend a good bit of time in New York at Exterminator Chile. Yes, remember that place I loved. My two best friends worked there, Tom Gilroy and Jim McKay, both artists, and Michael Imperioli from who went on to do The Sopranos, worked there as well. But you used to go for lunch and occasionally for dinner. Yes, And the person who managed Exterminated Chili, whose name I can't think of now because I haven't thought about it since then, managed band and we ended up signing that band called Masters of Reality that were a super cool kind of psychedelic psychedelic rock band. I remember Masters of Reality. That's pretty cool. And also, but why are eight there. Wow, the Chili Peppers made a video there, I think, and that might have been before your time. Yeah, thinking about the early days of punk rock and starting your post punk band, I guess would you would you qualify rim as a post punk I think so. Yeah, Yeah, it was alternative music. Could you possibly imagine that it would become as popular and as mainstream as it ended up being? I think, to be completely honest, I think that was my intention all along. I wanted to be as big as I could possibly be. I just wanted to be really super fucking famous and not by any means necessary, which is what you find in today's culture. You know, there are people that are famous for the sake of being famous, and you know, then they become a billionaire with a makeup line or whatever. That's that's a little insulting, frankly for those of us who actually work at more than just business. But yeah, I wanted. I knew that I had something to offer. I didn't know what it was when I was nineteen or when I was fifteen, but you know, over the course of a few records, I figured out that I had a voice and that and then much later I found out that voice was quite unique and uh, and I started really enjoying the process of writing. And you know, Peter, Mike and I and Bill when he was in the band, we're the best of friends, and we supported each other, We loved each other. We kept each other alive many times, and we had a great grand adventure together, which you know, for me lasted thirty two years. The postpartum after thirty two years is let me tell you, that's something that's that's a high that you don't come down from easily. And so it took me several years to kind of I had really had to step away from music because I'm all and you know, I don't do anything halfway. I accept the defeats and the embarrassments along with the triumphs and the hit singles, but if I don't do anything halfway. And so when when ari Am finally disbanded, I needed to take a break and I needed to not think about or look at music for a long time. And it turned out it was like five years before I actually kind of accidentally fell back into it through Fisher Spooner and then working with Andy on that project, I realized that he and I had this really good rapport as as co writers, and we started working together and now we're involving all these other people. Galen Lea do you know her. She's this astonishing singer songwriter from the Minneapolis Saint Paul area. She has this astonishing, incredible, incredible presence and a very very unique voice, and our voices meld together beautifully. So so Galen is contributing on the record, some other people have stepped in to do work, and I'm just really very excited about it. It's it's it's a very different you know, I have no representation now, I have no record company. I was. I was under contract since I was twenty two years old, and now I'm sixty two years old, and uh, and I'm a free agent. I can do whatever I want, and I don't. There's nothing forcing me or making me make the choices that I make other than just wanting to create things that are beautiful and that inspired people in somewhere. And the reason I asked about what you thought was possible was I remember being in my parents house and seeing looking at the New York Times Sunday calendar section, and there was a full page ad for the police at Madison Square Garden and I remember looking at it, I think, I think this is a mistake. The Police can't play at Madison Square Garden. They play at the club's you know they play. I went to the Roxy and to the Ritz and to you know, to the Palladium. They could maybe play at the Palladium. They can't play at Madison Square Garden. That's not where That's not where the Police play. That's not where the groups that I like play. That must have been after Roxane. Yeah, you know my band, my former band Oriam, opened for the Police, actually not at Madison Scrub Garden but at Shay State when they played there. And we had the same booking agent who Mike and Bill, the drummer and bass player for former drummer and bass player knew Ian Copeland very well. They worked for him in Bacon when when he first started and he put us on this bill. It was us and Joan Jett in the Black Hearts and the Police, and we played a twenty minute set in the pouring rain. I was twenty three, I think, and Andy Warhol was there and Joan Jett came and said hello, and I was really because I loved the Runaways. I loved Joan Jett, who else? Matt Dillon came, Matt telling he was a big fan, and he came by and said hello. So that was a That was an August afternoon for us. What was it like walking out onto that stage? What was the feeling? I imagine what size places were you playing at that time? At twenty three, we were playing clubs seven people rick, nobody knew who arium was. Nobody cared, and that's fine, you know, I mean, it was just it was like throwing raw meat to dogs. You know, they had no idea who we were. We were on and off before they could get angry and like throw bottles at us. And you know, we did a really tight set. Everything was very very like Ramone speed at that point with Orium, so it actually I kind of developed a singing style because the band refused to play slower than they did. Mike was really loved the Ramones and really loved a really fast bass part, so everything was really like rockabilly Ramons kind of fast. And I got tired of singing that fast and I thought it was boring, so I started slowing down my part. It's the one thing I could do. They wouldn't slow down, so I slowed down my part, and that actually became a singing style for me. By the time we recorded our first album and a song like talk about the Passion, they were playing everything really fast and jangly, and I was just singing very very slowly and holding my vowels, and that became what that became, well, something like a install. I guess I'm so happy to see I have to say. I feel I miss you and I love you, and it's so nice to talk to you, and I feel like we I feel there are a million things for us to talk about, because everything you said is the beginning of another conversation. Like we could talk about the Village Voice alone forever. I was a pack rat when I was a kid, and I subscribe to the Village Voice. And at one point there was an entire room of my family house that I grew up in Florida ceiling the entire room of just Village Voice newspapers because I saved everyone, and I didn't save them in any way that I could refer back to them. But when my mom would say we have to throw away these newspapers, I said, you can't throw them away, because I might have to refer back to something in those There was no way for me to do that, but I wanted to know all of the information in all of these newspapers. It was our life's blood. We have a lot in common record. I'm pack rat would be a very friendly term for what we call me and my father. I'm a hoarder, and I happen to have really good taste, and I've had a fascinating life thus far. So the things that I've parted are for the most part, pretty interesting. Stacks and piles, and you know, Warhole had his time capsules, which was just cardboard boxes and he would jam everything that came to him would go into a cardboard box and that became time capsules. It was my friend Todd Everley who used to He's a photographer, very talented artist, and he worked for Vanity Fair forever. But he was called to the Warhole Museum and he was handed the task of photographing time capsules that Warhole had left when he died that had never been open before, and he found some unbelievable things. I still regard Warhole as the greatest artists of the twentieth century, the close second being Brenkouzi Brenkouzi managed to bring modernism and traditionalism together, not capital tea but small tea, traditionalism together in art, and do so in a way that was that was not only elegant, but but insanely timeless. Yeah, and felt new. It's interesting when someone can make something traditional and modern and it lives in both worlds. It still feels new. That's the thing. You see your brand Cuisy piece and you're like, what is this? This is the most elegant, the most I'm using that word a lot, but it does describe I think it's his work. I remember one of my fondest memories of things that we got to do together was we went to Manhattan's Center for an event for Johnny Cash and it was a tribute to Johnny Cash. But he sang at the tribute and it was a beautiful I remember we were sitting up in the left balcony and it was just a beautiful night, and I was just so glad that we got to do that together. I think, I think that's because of you that I've managed to make it backstage before the show and I met Johnny for the first time. I had met June several times before because of charity events that we were both attending, but I had never met Johnny, and as it turns out, of course, that was one that was in the last year of his life. So thank you for allowing me to meet Johnny Cash, one of my great heroes. We have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from Michael Stipe. We're back with more from Rick Rubin's conversation with Michael Stipe. When you guys first toured, what was your first tour vehicle? A Dodge Van van Green? How many years were you guys in a Dodge Van. We didn't have a bus until nineteen eighty four, so we were four years in the in a van. It's just I think it's interesting for people to understand at the time that you guys became who you became, what work went into it, because I don't know that that really exists in the world anymore. It's a it's a little bit of a loss people going out on the road and building up a following and someday getting to play at the Rose Bowl. Let's say where where. I remember when I heard that you were playing at the Rose Bowl and you were already r Am and I was surprised you were playing at the Rose Bowl, because like, that's the Rose Bowl. It's unbelievable. Patti Smith did an interview with The Guardian. She was quoting someone I don't know who said up but in referencing work as an artist, it's a ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. And in the nineteen eighties we certainly put in our fair share of perspiration. And in the process of building up that that audience and a reputation as a band, we actually got our chops. You know, we grew up in public. I mean, we had no idea what we were doing. I didn't know that a bass guitar made the loan notes until our second album. I didn't know that. I knew that it was the one with four strings. That's all I knew. I mean, I was that ignorant of music. And and yet we managed to create this these songs that were really quite stunning, and we were lucky to work with people like Mitchister and Don Dixon or in the early days to help us kind of form what was a sound. You know, at the time in the early eighties, everybody wanted the vocal really loud and the drums really loud because it was post disco, and even if you were no matter who you were, if you turn the drums up, you're going to have a hit, or you're more likely to have a hit. And we were like, turned the drums down, and turn the vocal down, and turn it. We were the people that were saying turn everything down. We don't, we want everything quieter. Thank God for remastering because we're able to go back onto those recordings now and bring it up to speed to what these things sound like. With digital technology, with the advent of of all of our devices, and the way that we hear things now was very, very different from nineteen eighty two. Was the road from the Dodge van up to the state eventually stadiums. Was it a consistent road or were there like moments on the way where they were breakthroughs. You remember the first time something big happened, Well, the first big thing was when I walked on stage for the first time ever, and I was like, this is a this is where I like, I loved it. And half the time again I was you know, I tranced when I performed, so half the time I was kind of not really there. I could be reminded of something and be like, oh, yeah, that's when I stumbled over and I hit that note that I don't usually hit, or that's when someone threw something and it hit me in the shoulder. But I would go into really a trance state when I performed, and and that's very lucky for me. You know, it kept me from becoming terribly self conscious. I was as pretentious as anyone, and I embrace that pretension. I love pretensions, as you know. If you think of it as a way to rise out of yourself and to allow yourself to become something bigger than what you are, then wow, I'm really pretentious. And look where it placed me. I'm okay with that. Yeah, I love to perform. What was the question, Rick, That was a good question. We're talking about the first moment where like something big happened. So the first one you gave me was stepping on stage and realizing this is for you. And then in the band, when was the first moments like oh this is things are things are changing. I can answer that and it echoes the rest of our conversation. Yeah, we were voted band of the Year Jazz and Pop Pass and Job. Yeah, Vollage Voice Murmur, our first album nineteen eighty three Record of the Year by the critics choice, and that was over Michael Jackson's Thriller. So the enormity of that to us, you know, we were living in this rundown fleaback hotel in Times Square. I would eat one knish a day. I knew where I could go to get it. I knew where I could go and bat my eyelashes and get someone to buy me a beer and not have to you know, not have to get laid in the prop but I you know, I would, I would. I lived off of a knish. We were living on five dollars a day and a bag of M and m's that my uncle left when he traveled through New York. We had nothing, and our record was the Village Voice Record of the Year over Michael Jackson's Thriller. We were playing clubs to twelve and fifteen people at a time, you know. But but anyway, I mean those were the days. You know, it was good fun and we made the most of it. And I'm glad I had those experiences. And what was the next like breakthrough moments like oh, this is bigger than that. What were just looking for like the stages of development. Fall On Me was the video that MTV had to play. I was disgusted by most music videos. I thought they were cheesy and stupid, so I refused to lip sync and we refused to perform in them, and fall On Me became kind of a minor hit and so in America. And so the video I was I shot with a sixteen millimeter camera and a rock quarry outside of Bloomington, Indiana, with a guy that I had a giant crush on at the time, and I developed the film, turned it upside down, ran it backwards, ran the words to the song over this really shitty black and white footage of a rock quarry, and that became the weirdest music video of the year on MTV. And so that was a big moment because I was like, wow, I can manipulate this. I can I can make them do things that they don't want to do just because they have to do it because the song is that good. Then of course we had a hit song, top ten song with the one I Love and that was the video was by Robert Longo, who's a pop artist and a great friend. And then the next big moment after that was was the Green World Tour, and then after that was losing my religion. And when losing my religion hit, you know, if I ever had I'm not a person who has ambitions. If they're they're they're unconscious or they're subconscious. I don't know which to call it. But I did always want to be really famous, and I didn't realize what really that entailed. And looking at it from the other side, it's nice to be anonymous again. I'm on the subway and nobody knows who I am. They don't look at me. If anyone under the age of thirty does not even look at me, because they just register old. And I'm fine with that. It's totally amazing. But losing my religion was when I went from being someone that was recognized by people in my age group who loved a certain type of music to being universally wildly, insanely famous and on the street like I couldn't know anywhere, and it was okay. It was kind of charming. In New York, people yell whatever they want to yell at you. They tell you if they like you, they tell you if they think you suck, and I kind of love that about New York, and I never liked LA because I never knew where I stood with people there. Everyone's your friend there. It's very isolating and very kind of aggressively calm, and I can't stand it. But I'm sorry, Los Angeles. There are aspects to it that I love, and there are people that I love but can't can't do it. But losing my religion really changed it for me. And one thing if I ever had an ambition, it might be to have a song of the summer, and losing my religion became RIM's song of the Summer and that was that was thrilling. Yeah, what do you remember about writing first? First of all, when you wrote it, did you know that song was special? No? No, In fact, we released it as a first single thinking that it was going to set up the next song, which was something much more pop. I don't remember what it was. And then eventually I Think Everybody Hurts, which was a big ballad, and that became a hit song around the world, and so that was also really good for us. But and that's a beautiful video as well. Yeah, no, we did. We didn't know it was going I mean, it's such a weird song. We had no idea that it was going to resonate the way that it. What do you remember about writing it? I changed one lyric. I remember, that's me in the kitchen, that's me in the spotlight. No, that's the that's me in the corner. That's me in the spotlight. That's me in the corner, that's me in the kitchen. So what I was pulling from was being the shy wallflower who hangs back at the party or at the dance and doesn't go up to the person that you're maddly in love with and say, I've kind of got a cross on you. How do you feel about me? So there's this whole relationship that's happening only in the person's mind, and he doesn't know whether he's said too much or hasn't said enough. So he's like in the corner of the dance floor watching everyone dance and watching the love of his life on the dance floor dancing with everyone because that's the most exciting person. Or he's in the kitchen, you know, behind the refrigerator, and I changed the kitchen to spotlight, and instantly, of course, the song became about me, which it never was. I don't think. I mean, I'm pretty self aware, but the video with Tarsaum is what really pushed it over the edge, and that was probably the queerest video of all time, and that was kind of nice. Yeah, I'm harping on it because I heard it the other day in a shop that I was in and me and my partner stopped and listened to it, and we both looked at each other, and I don't know if we actually teared up or if we just had the feeling of tearing up, do you know what I'm talking about, Like the emotion came. I don't know if there were actual tears. It's amazing that the song to this day has this power to it and I don't truly understand it, you know, I don't. I don't know that it's the words. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why it has so much emotional resonance. But it's one of these songs that when you hear it, you know, the world stops and you're you're put in the place of wherever this song is happening, and you're in the void of the song. It's mystical. It's very that's very generous. Thank you very much. That means a lot to me coming from you. Thank you. Just tell me about the experience of writing. Where did the music exist first? How did it happen? The music has just existed. First, I know that Peter Peter was tired of playing guitar and didn't Oriam's former guitars after touring for nine ten years in the nineteen eighties, and he was buying wild interesting instruments that he did not play, and his experimentation as a musician was to throw roads in front of himself by trying to play something that he couldn't play. So this was one of his first experiments on mandolin. We still have the original cassette that he gave me of Losing My Religion, and it is exactly the same arrangement. It sounds identical to what wound up as the final version of the song. So that's all Peter. You know, everybody hurts was Bill Berry and Supernatural, super serious was Mike Mills. I mean, those guys quite often would turn in things that were so brilliant and you know, even day, I think in the arrangement they might not realize that. Well, I can flesh this out with a story I can throw a trajectory and a narrative into this and make this arrangement work. Sometimes, no, sometimes we had to make a lot of arrangement changes in order to fit the vocal or the melody into the song. I was always about shorter songs. I always wanted to get in and get out, leave him wanting more always, and so a lot of the stuff that I'm doing as a solo artist is much It's very pop, but it's incredibly short songs. Would you start with like a scat vocal or would you start by writing? To just tell me the process of you? You hear music, you're inspired by it. How do you get to a song? What's your process? Historically, I hear music and I'm inspired by it, and there's a melody that comes along, and I close my eyes and I see a landscape and music translates to me as as as a visual and so a good music. Bad music is just fucking horrible, like bad, like what my dentist was playing this morning, by the way, I hope he's listening. I was like, I was like, we have to we have to talk about the music. We have a very good rapport now because his dental assistant, and he had very different musical tastes. So they'll they'll throw a song on when I'm there just to see how I react, and one of them will say, Michael, and I'll say, like turn it off now, like next, next, next, and she'll crack up because she'll have told him he's going to hate this song. This is not a good song. Do you write just the number of lyrics that are in the song are there's sometimes more verses like how does it happen? There's often there's often more verses, but it really depends on how much I going back to the conversation earlier about trusting your gut, you know, when I close my eyes and I see that music, I always saw my job as my job is now to put a narrative on top of that, to create some kind of story that people can follow along with. And it doesn't have to make really linear sense. I'm really good at not making linear sense. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense, and sometimes you need a little bit of an indication of what's happening, but clues as to what the story is actually about, and I hope to provide those as a lyricists. I hope that by the end of the song, I will have provided some clue to what's going on. I did that with RM, and I'm doing it now as a solo, so hopefully it's going to work. There's another song that we're working on right now. The working title is I'm the Charge and everything you need to know about this character is in the second verse and the last three words, which have nothing to do with the rest of the song, But they set up another song which is an entirely different piece of music the same character thirty years later. And I'm following the arc of this character over time, and I'm imbuing this character with this extremely shifting sense of self, going from someone who's extremely vulnerable and quite difficult, but always in charge, always in power, to someone who's extremely invulnerable and almost cynical in their work. But they have developed, They've developed this very tough skin, but they're now using the vulnerability of their youth to be able to create work that, although is uninteresting for them, inspires others. Boy, that sounded like a really bad off Broadway played. Admit, I'm sorry, I'm talking to myself here and you just happen to be present. Sorry, Rick. Anyway, the song is called I'm the Charge, and the second song is called it doesn't have The working title would be a Pull of Love. Will the whole album have an arc like that? I don't know yet because I'm still working on it. No, I don't tend to write. I will revisit characters from time to time, and then I have to question. Often I have to question myself, like how did I embody this person? What what gender did I make them? What political leaning did I give to them? What what horrible position did I put them in that they now have to work their way out of or have some cathartic moment that pulls them out of it, like the song Sad Professor, or one of my favorite RIM songs, Country Feedback. That song, I think in my memory, I sang it one time and that was it. I think. In the rerelease the band put out the twenty fifth anniversary rerelease, they found a demo. But you hear at the very beginning of the song, I say these clothes and I pause because I came into early, and then I say, these clothes unfit us right, and I'm to blame. It's all the same, It's all the same. I didn't know the song I hadn't worked it out. I hadn't mapped it out. Peter has this memory of me walking into the studio with a piece of paper that had a drawing of an Indian, a pencil drawing of an Indian on it, and a few words on a piece of paper, and he said he walked in with that, and that was the song, and that became Country Feedback. The working title was Country Feedback because it sounds like a country song. It was very obviously inspired by Neil Young, and it has feedback on feedback aatana, so that the working title became the title of the song. I remember performing it, and it was at John Keene's studio in Athens, Georgia, and it was in a ISO booth, and I was in headphones, which I can't stand to sing into because the engineers can never get the mix right for me, and it makes me crazy. I hear myself too much or I don't hear enough, and I like singing into an open mic at a desk, but that of course causes all kinds of problems with digital technology. Anyway, I remember singing it walking out and walking out of the house and the studio and I was done that was it for the night. I didn't remember it until I don't think they even played it for me. The next day, the band listened to it, and I think they listened to it a few times, and then I came in two days later and listened and I was like, this is I'm not going to resing it. That's a that's the take. I did the same thing with World Leader Pretend Rip, another song that the heavy of obvious inspiration there was Leonard Cohen. I lifted everything that I could from from that beautiful, beautiful writer of a man, beautiful man of a writer, and I used, you know, the language, the dialect of war to describe an inner battle, a deep emotional turmoil inside the protagonist of that song. And I sing it once and I was so impressed by myself that it was the first time that RM put that I allowed the lyrics to be printed on the album's sleep that we were I think nine years into our career at that point, and I had yet to lip sync in a video. I refused to do it. I thought it was too cheesy. So we were you know, we we I mean, as a band, we always knew what we didn't want to do. We knew that we didn't want to be cheesy. If we were gonna be cheesy, we're gonna be cheesy on our own terms, and god knows we were, but they were on our terms, yeah, and they were quite beautiful when it happens. You know, there was a there was an element of cheese there and sinamentality, and that's okay, that's part of pop music. But it was on our terms always, and I'm so very proud of that. You know, what we left behind is this body of work that I include the times that we fell on our face publicly, and I did many many times, and I humiliated and embarrassed myself over and over again in public. But guess what I embraced those moments along with the hit singles and the triumphs and the moments of absolute joy and being able to meet people like yourself and Fatilkhan and Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, my hero. You know, I don't even like guitar, and here's Tom Verlaine, you know, the one guy that I could actually watch play guitar and not blink for forty minutes other than Peter Back, of course. Yeah, what a life that provided me, and what a journey I've been on. I feel like really a very, very lucky person. I had this ridiculous teenage fantasy dream idea of what I was going to do with my life, and I actually, with a lot of work, I actually made it happen. And here I am kind of looking back on it, but I'm also looking forward because you know the songs that we've put out that I've put out each song for the first year of its release. All of the money that I would make on that song, whether it's through a movie, through a TV show, being in a commercial which hasn't happened yet, but I'm offering it up right now on this podcast, all of the publishing that I would make from the first year of the release of that song goes to a charitable organization of my choosing. So far, it's been Extinction Rebellion and Pathway to Paris. Extinction Rebellion for the first song that I released as a solo artist, which is called Your Capricious Soul, and then Pathway to Paris is an organization trying to hold the United States and other nations to the Paris Agreement in terms of environmental a blueprint for where we need to go in order to not wipe ourselves out and take a lot of other species with us. And that was a song called Drive to the Ocean, which I'm extremely proud of. And I think I'm just gonna release sum a single at a time. I don't feel like I need to compete with Duelppa or name Whoever's amazing right now? Who's amazing? Rosalia? What the fuck? She? Where the fuck did that come from? She's incredible. We'll be right back after a break with more from Michael Stipe and Rick Rubin. We're back with Michael Stipe, but before we jump back into this conversation with Rick, let's hear his new song future a future feature. Future feature is fast goodtion, co hearted cards, still seats, fly flies words ha ha ha I am I am got flight up the meek with the event between one stable. Please save us a termpion purpose sweeing smacking with ecstatic fresh. Please don't stare with doing all week. Please don't stare with doing all we can dy come she is a sea. We uns much now it's fair. Please don't stare you know can future future the futures start to high has guess you've got dear us. We've got the power. Please tell stay, tell me how that got written, tell me the story of writing it. It's one of those songs that just flew out, and I didn't think too much about the lyric the music. I believe most of the music came from Andy Lemster, but we worked together in the studio. We you know, I don't play an instrument. I played classical piano when I was a child. I played accordion as a as a as a very young man. I think I was eight or nine years old when I picked up accordion, and then I stopped both and forgot everything that I knew about music and reading reading music because I read classical piano, you know, off the off the page. But but I don't play anything. So I became the singer in ORIM and that's good and fine. And from time to time I would like, you know, have a guitar and pretend like I could play it, but I couldn't. I still can't play an ef A B. But I started writing after RIM disbanded ten years ago. I started writing music on synthesizer and really enjoyed the process. Us and realize how really difficult composing is. I mean, it's a way different story from lyrics and melodies and singing, you know, it's just a way different thing. And also working on music, I would almost go into a trance state, which is good because I would forget who made the music, and it was in fact me or me and Andy working together. This one is mostly Andy, I think musically, and then the lyric flew out of me. I didn't. I didn't really question it or overthink it, and I think that that's really my superpower now. My superpower as the singer of Brim was realizing that as a man presenting as a man in my era, in my time period, that my vulnerability and my ability to express that vulnerability was was really something that we had not seen in a way that wasn't just super hyper cheesy and manipulative. So that vulnerability became a superpower. Now. I think my superpower is recognizing that and my gut is really really good. And if I don't overthink things, you know, right, drunk edit sober, you take that in extrapolated and you move it into a not like Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal like universe. I write without thinking, I write, I go in, I go into a trance, and I write right right, I write, and then I edit and I edit sober, and I go, Okay, that's crap. That's bad poetry. That's not bad, not great poetry. But if we repeated a few times, maybe it's a good chorus. And you use those tricks that you learn. But I don't ever think things anymore. I just kind of let them flow out, and when they're not flowing, I put them aside and I go work in photography or other mediums. And I'm working in all these different things now. I'm putting out photo books and I have a big show in Milan. I'm having a solo exhibition at the Ica in Milan of all the work that the plastic work that I do, the stuff that's sculptural or photo based. And there will be a music musical component to that show. But yeah, if the music is feeling a little stale, then I just jumped to one of my other things, and one of my other things, and I come back around and I listened to it with fresh years, and they go, well, that's one of the worst courses I've ever written, so let's re examine it. I want to I want to come to the show in Milan. When that happens, beautiful It's opening. In early November twenty three, you said something interesting that your superpower in RM was your vulnerability. When did you realize that, because I imagine in the early days you were just vulnerable. You weren't somebody who understood that your vulnerability was a superpower. No, I didn't understand that at all. I didn't understand. I mean I didn't understand from the very early moment that we spoke about, where I decided at the age of fifteen that I was going to become a singer in a band. It didn't occur to me that you have to You have to have a modic amout talent. You have to be able to do something. You have to be able to stand on stage and perform. You have to be able to write songs. You have to be able to sing those songs. You have to work with other people. You have to travel NonStop, you have to eat really shitty food most of that time. You have adrenaline and addiction issues to deal with, because adrenaline is the most hardcore drug I've ever ever in my life taken and not taken everything. But you know, I quit drugs when I was twenty three, I drink occasionally. Now I still love to drink, but I know it's not good for me, so I try to limit it. I'm thinking about going back to gummies. You know. I'm excited here in New York. You know, it's it's now illegal, and I haven't touched weeds since I was seventeen years old. So although actually the truth says, I worked on a record with a Fisher Spooner kind of accidentally reintroduced me to music about five years ago, and I wound up producing their album, and it's a it's a really good record, culled sir, And it's a very very very very very queer, very gay record in terms of its thematic content and it's trajectory. But in writing that record, I experimented with weed a little bit, and I smoked weed for the first time since Wow, I was a kid, and some pretty good songs came out of it. I have to say, so, who knows, I'm excited. I'm really really sensitive, Like I'm really sensitive. I'm allergic to all these foods and I'm allergic to all this stuff, and I have to be very careful, you know, like what kind of things I breathe and all this blah blah blah. But so I can take the tiniest amount of weed that would, you know, the what other people wouldn't even feel, and it knocks me over, but it makes for a really good lyric writing. So maybe I'll maybe I'm going to move into weed now. That'll be a third act for me. What's your favorite song on the Fisher Spooner record. Well, the one that I wrote We Too is called I Need Love, and I'm actually I'm thinking about covering it. I think it's such a good song. What motivated you to feel like it's time to do a solo project? It's it's interesting that you haven't done one yet, and the fact that now you're deciding to do one makes it interesting. With this window of time, I can be really honest, and I've said this before, but I love my voice. I love my singing voice. I don't like my speaking voice, although I'm really glad we're talking, but I love my voice, and I feel like I have a limited amount of time in which to use that voice. You know, I kind of feel like, I mean, I'm not a Christian, I'm not I'm a deeply spiritual person, but I don't really follow any particular path, but I do feel in a way that I don't know. I've got a beautiful voice, and I really I really enjoy it, and a lot of people like hearing me sing, and music has a really powerful medium, and I feel like I've got a lot to say, so why not use that voice and stop talking, just get back to sing. And I enjoyed a lot. It's My first real love was photography, and I've now been putting on a book a year and I intend to do that for the rest of my life, and I hope that I love a really long time. We have forty or fifty more books coming as much as as much as I find immense joy and putting together images that I've taken or things that I've collected and showing them to kind of introduce the way that I see and feel and interpret the world and the way that I moved through it, because I do feel like, you know, we're all unique in our own ways, right, We're all little snowflakes. But but there is there is something to the way I put things together that I think is enjoyable for other people. So I really like doing that but nothing beats coming up with a lyric and a melody that people come back to you two days, three days, four days later and say, I can't stop singing your song. Thank you for that. That song was there for me at a very important moment for me. You know that kind of I sang last night. In fact, Rick, you knew how Wellner, I'm sure. And we had a memorial for him the last night at Saint Anne's warehouse, and I did a song written by his best friend lou Reid that I had covered for the Velvet Underground record that came out with Todd Haynes's documentary, and I told how I said I would participate in the project if I could have the first song on. It's a recreation of the first album by the Velvet Underground, which in my life ranks as one of the top five records of all times. You have to interpret music like that in the same way that you interpreted Hurt. And handed that to Johnny Cash and said do what you'd do with this, and he took that and he made it a better song than it ever was or ever will be again. And we have you to thank for that. And Mark Romanick did the video for that correct. Yes, beautiful, astonishing video with June, one of the most It's really one of those like moments. And you know, I know you're not a boastful person, but you should be very very proud of that moment that you offered us just in that one single collaboration. That's such a beautiful, beautiful thing. Do you like singing in front of people? Do you like the feeling of how being in front of an audience? I've blacked out last night on stage because there were no vocals in the monitor, and I just went into kind of I had rehearsed it three times, so I don't really remember the performance, but everything before it and after it was okay. As soon as I found out that the voice was actually in the house, then I was okay. I couldn't tell if my voice was actually being projected into the house or not. But yeah, when you do something that's not just one song at a memorial or on a TV show, you know, you go into a journalized state. And as I mentioned earlier, that's the most powerful drug I've ever taken. And it's why I think so many of our people, and I'm speaking of creative people wind up in trouble because you you come off of a tour, you wind up, you finish a movie, or you know, if you're in the heart of Globe Shatters, or if you're you're a professional athlete, you stopped the tour and your adournaline is writing at a rate that's superhuman, and you can't really match that with with anything. The only thing that I found, and I started this in the late eighties to combat that um, that hyper adrenalized state, was acupuncture. A lot of body work, but mainly acupuncture really helps a lot to kind of retune the endocrine system in particularly the kidneys to kidney energy. As a Chinese would call it beautiful. So it's almost like it's just that the nervous system is on high alert and you just need to calm it down, and it seems like acupuncture does that fight or flight. And then you know, after after you make an album, and you know this from from working on from working as a producer and otherwise, you know that you have this kind of postpartum You know, you work, you intensely work on something, so you put everything that you are into it and then it's over. And whether it's a tour or a record or what what, what have you? You go through this kind of postpartum and the adnal, the adrenaline has to go back down to not a fight or flight kind of place, and for most people that's very, very difficult, and to try to try to mimic the high that you get from adrenaline is literally impossible. Well, I want to thank you just for the songs. There's so many songs that you've written that have meant so much and that are so beautiful, and uh, I just want to thank you because I love them. I love the songs. Thank you, Rick, and I love you and I love how well I love receiving compliments from you. Uh yeah, thank you. I'm I'm really um, you know, I can, I can pretend to have humility, but I'm really proud of a lot of the work that I've done in my short time on this earth, And thank you. I really appreciate that. Obviously, I'm a giant fan of your work, and um, and it's a it's a good pleasure after all these years. We haven't seen each other in some time, huh, in a while, but it's really it's really great to talk to you and be able to just unravel some of these some of these threads, huh same and we will change that and see each other soon, I know at one one place or another, maybe in Milan, you never know. Please come to Milan. Okay, great? Thanks bye. Thanks to Michael Stipe for given insight into his early days with RM and sharing details about his upcoming solo project. To hear our favorite RM and Stipe solo songs, check out the playlist at Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where we can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is producing help from ly Arose, Jason Gambrell, Beentaladay, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chaffe. Our executive producer is Neil Aval. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and if you like the show, Please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. For the musics by Kenny Beats, I'm justin Richmond. Four