Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.

When Michael Stipe was little, his parents called him Mr. Mouse. He was a scurrier. As soon as he could stand, he ran, and when he ran, he ran until he face-planted. His mother would deposit him in a baby walker, but if Stipe scrambled as fast as he could and hit the threshold of a doorway with a running start, he could topple the walker and eject himself onto the floor. Then he’d spring to his feet and run away.

When he wasn’t racing in circles, he was daydreaming. All his life, thoughts, feelings and sensory information have coursed through him at gale force. His attention is perpetually whipsawing elsewhere or vaporizing entirely. He will say, over dinner, “I’m sorry, but the clavinet took me completely out of the conversation,” when a clavinet suddenly enters the restaurant’s background music. He will say — laughing at himself, after you ask about his difficulty concentrating — “You’re not going to believe this, but ask me again because my mind wandered in the middle of the question.”

Sometimes, when Stipe’s mind scampers away, it returns, like an outdoor cat, bearing relics from wherever it went. A mention of “Calaveras County” sends him back to 1984, when his former band, R.E.M., played a quintuple bill at a fairground there. (“I was on crutches, and I remember Huey Lewis carried my watermelon for me, and I thought that was really sweet.”) The word “podcast,” enunciated a particular way, reminds him of how Quincy Jones’s teenage daughter repeatedly pronounced the name “Todd” as she waited impatiently for L.L. Cool J., a.k.a. “Todd,” to arrive at their house. Nastassja Kinski was there, too. She was pregnant, radiant. “Like a night light,” Stipe said.

Madonna, Bono, Allen Ginsberg, River Phoenix, Elton John. Stipe is wary of sounding like a name-dropper, but these are just the people who populate his memories. He remains stunned by his own good fortune. And all because he had the nerve, or guilelessness, as a floppy-haired, know-nothing, 19-year-old art student, to stand on a stage with three friends and sing — then wound up in one of the most celebrated bands in the world. For three decades, Stipe whizzed around the planet with R.E.M. He raked experience in. And now you sense it’s all there, right on the surface; his mind seems to be ricocheting through some expansive ether of memory, information and stimuli, attuned to their entanglements and connections. Once — it would take too long to explain why — I spoke the name “Regis Philbin,” and Stipe offered, “Regis had a very flat face in real life.”

This was a very long time ago, during our first conversation at the beginning of last year. It had been slightly more than a decade since R.E.M. disbanded, in 2011, and in that time, Stipe published three books of photography, exhibited his visual art at galleries, popped up at benefits, memorial concerts, political rallies and parties of all kinds. But now, finally, he was once again deciding to prioritize the single most special thing he’s capable of doing, the thing millions of people most want him to do: He would sing.

“I’m putting together an album!” Stipe told me excitedly — a solo project. He said this as if he were making a grand announcement, as if I didn’t already know this. (This was our entire reason for talking.) He said he hoped the album would be out in early 2023.

“I’m in no rush,” I said.

We met for the first time in May 2022 at his art studio on the Lower East Side, a space that contained some of his own sculptural pieces and many other objects he’d collected: a pair of Nureyev’s ballet slippers, desks stacked on dressers. (“The idea of stacking furniture to me is really fascinating,” he said.) Stipe had recently recognized that he was “sitting on a landfill of my own making,” and he was working to break that great aggregation apart. He was selling or giving away much of his renowned collection of outsider art. At his other studio, at another of his homes, in Athens, Ga., his studio manager was cataloging the more than 30,000 photographs that Stipe has snapped, diaristically, throughout his adult life. “I’m healthy and young, but it feels like I’m inside a chrysalis,” he explained. “I’m shifting.”

He was 62 at the time: still plenty of sand in the top half of the hourglass. But, he explained, “I’m at that age where I’m realizing, OK: All these ideas I want to focus on, I’m not going to have the life span to be able to complete all of them.” It wasn’t lost on him how many friends and acquaintances whose names came crackling into our conversation were no longer alive. Even on his way to meet me, Stipe said, he’d gotten news alerts that two people he knew had died: the actor Ray Liotta and Andy Fletcher, a founder of Depeche Mode. Stipe’s point was: “I have to start choosing and picking.”

He invited me to his next recording sessions, in September. But September turned into November. And in November, Stipe got Covid. It was brutal for a week, then left a residue of strange sensations: “My whole body feels buzzy and electric,” he texted. Regardless, “I fully expect we will reschedule for a few days in December.”

December passed. He planned on January. But his uncle was hospitalized, and Stipe’s family was banding together in Athens to help him recover. January was kaput. “I have been referring to ’22 as the year of flexibility by necessity,” he wrote in an email, “and i’m hoping that ’23 is the year of flexibility by choice. i remain optimistic on all fronts.”

In February, a windstorm knocked over a pecan tree at his home in Athens, flattening his Tesla, which Stipe was actually happy about because he’d intended to get rid of the car, to disentangle himself from Elon Musk, and now the universe had totaled it and provided him with insurance money and permission to buy whatever he wanted. He and his boyfriend, the artist Thomas Dozol, had moved out of their apartment in New York and were living in a temporary rental. “I’ve taken overwhelmed to new weights and heights,” Stipe said on the phone, while a tremendous amount of unspecified clattering sounded in the background. But he planned to return to Athens for two weeks very soon, to hunker down and write: “I have to finish these songs already. They’re driving me crazy.”

That didn’t happen: “Life got in the way.” Later, he clarified that when he said, “Life got in the way,” he meant significant and unpredictable events, like a family health emergency or having a tree fall on your car, but he also meant that, for him, “life literally gets in the way.” He might sit down to make headway on a lyric only to tilt his gaze up momentarily and spot a flag flying outside the window — “Oh, there’s a flag! That’s cool. What does that ‘H’ stand for? Look how it’s directly between those two towers!” — or notice the severe look of his own reflection, how much it looked like something from Stalinist Russia. “Nothing is easy,” Stipe confessed. “I just get distracted by everything.”

March happened — all 31 days of it. Then came April, which “went kind of pear-shaped.” Stipe and Dozol moved a second time, quite suddenly and several months earlier than they’d anticipated. Stipe also went back and forth to Italy that spring to work with the curator of his first solo art exhibition for a major institution, opening this month at the ICA Milano. The show itself had already been postponed because of the pandemic, and Stipe had since reconceived it entirely, twice, and was now busily making it anew. (He also decided to put out another art book.)

At that point, I still couldn’t tell how distressed he was by these disruptions — to what extent they were disruptions, or if this was just the ragged flux of his ordinary life.

Then it was May again. Three hundred and sixty-one days had passed.

Just before Memorial Day in 2023, Stipe finally committed to barging ahead with his new material. He would spend a week at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, the legendary recording studio opened by Jimi Hendrix in 1970.

Taylor Swift was spending that same week at Electric Lady, passing time between dates on her Eras Tour in one of the basement studios. Outside, hundreds of Swifties arrayed themselves behind barricades, casing their surroundings, checking their phones; the atmosphere was like a campfire quietly crackling, ready for another log. And then she’d emerge — straight into a vortex of screaming and tears, while online punditry wrapped around her outfits and the mind-bending combinations of collaborators and friends who were coming and going as well. What were they all doing in there? It was anyone’s guess.

Stipe had booked the studio on the third floor, which opened onto a patio on the building’s roof. One evening, I found him outside in the thick of conversation with two younger musicians he’d just met. They happened to be Jack Antonoff, one of Swift’s producers and among the most prolific operators in pop music, and Matty Healy, the frontman of the 1975. (This was during the slender window of time when Healy and Swift were purportedly dating.) Antonoff and Healy were both big R.E.M. fans. They talked to Stipe primarily by talking about music to each other. The discourse was fast, encyclopedic and cerebral, and Stipe listened with deep interest as the two men expounded on the dementedness of contemporary culture and issued insightful critical takes. “From Grimes to Caroline Polachek, I would have never guessed that Enya would be such a touchstone,” Antonoff said at one point. Healy recounted asking someone’s 12-year-old son what kind of music he liked, then which bands he liked, and how the boy seemed utterly stumped.

“So I said, ‘Well, what songs do you like?’ And he said to me: ‘What full songs?’ That was his response! The decimal point has moved! I didn’t realize that the denomination was now smaller than the song.”

When Healy explained that, for years, he’s been nursing a renegade theory that R.E.M. was the first true emo band, Stipe considered the idea and said, “I was profoundly depressed most of that time.”

Stipe’s relationship to music felt different from theirs; the conversation wasn’t happening in his native tongue. When he interjected, which he didn’t often, it was usually to clarify some reference he hadn’t picked up. (What did Antonoff mean when he said Paul Simon “doesn’t always get his flowers?” What was “getting the bag?”) Stipe’s role in R.E.M.’s creative process was sensory and responsive: He had three brilliant bandmates who threw new music at him constantly, and it was up to him to seize on the particular songs that spoke to him and fuse each with a melody. That dynamic seemed to be retained in how he experienced music in general. He wasn’t uninterested in artists’ lineages and influences, but he focused more on how their music felt in his body, whether those sounds made him move.

During a rare, microbeat of silence in the conversation, Healy turned to Stipe and asked, “Is it true you have one of Kurt Cobain’s guitars?”

“Peter does,” Stipe said — meaning, R.E.M.’s guitarist, Peter Buck.

Stipe, famously, tried to help Cobain toward the end of his life — though he stresses that this relationship has been mythologized over time. (He just figured he was qualified to offer Cobain support, he said: “We both had this same, strange job.”) But yes, he explained to Healy and Antonoff: Cobain and Courtney Love bought a house near Buck’s in Seattle in the early ’90s. After Cobain died, Love gave Buck one of her husband’s blue guitars.

“The Jag-Stang,” Healy said knowingly.

“I don’t know what kind it is,” Stipe said. “It’s beautiful, and it’s kind of round.”

Twenty-four hours later, Taylor Swift would gush to Stipe: “Jack and Matty were saying they talked to you for hours yesterday. They were like, ‘Best conversation!’ They were so excited to be talking to you!” Stipe had been invited downstairs to say hello and, finding Swift standing in the doorway, extended his hand and said: “You must be Taylor” — an objectively cool thing to say to Taylor Swift.

It was a scene down there, man. Antonoff eventually reappeared with his soon-to-be-wife, the actress Margaret Qualley. Florence — she of the Machine — would pass through quickly, spectrally, dispensing soft hellos. Chitchat burbled exuberantly in all directions, while Stipe quickly beckoned forward his friend and art-studio manager, David Belisle, to be introduced. “David’s a giant fan of yours,” he told Swift, while Belisle blushed. “And he’s coming to see you on Friday!” (“Seriously?!” Swift replied, and — this was amazing — sounded earnestly touched that this one individual had bought a ticket to her show.) At one point, Stipe turned to Phoebe Bridgers, whom he met once at a benefit — “My goddaughters are all huge fans of yours,” he reminded her — and asked: “You’re touring all summer?”

Bridgers explained that she was about to play her last dates as an opener on Swift’s tour, but she’d still be on the road. “With boygenius. Do you know those guys?”

“Nuh-uh,” Stipe said. Then he turned to his producer and asked, “Do I?”

“It’s cool,” Bridgers said. “It’s my other project with my two best friends.”

“Oh, I want to know about that,” Stipe said.

There’d been an interesting moment back on the roof, though. Eventually, Stipe revealed to Antonoff and Healy that he was at Electric Lady working on his first solo record. (Healy responded with a drawn-out and reverent four-letter word.) Stipe had no qualms about sharing how tough the process had been so far, and how slow-going. Later he’d tell me: “I’m wildly insecure. I have impostor syndrome to the [expletive] max.” Sometimes Instagram served him clips of R.E.M. concerts, and he wondered: Where did it come from, the audacity to do that in front of tens of thousands of people? He told Antonoff and Healy, “It’s hard to be in competition with your former self.”

He said this with disarming sweetness. Antonoff tried to buck him up. He explained that, when he’s making something, he finds he just needs a few songs he’s proud of to make the entire project start to feel sufficiently sturdy. “You can wear them as armor,” he said.

But Stipe disagreed — definitively. He could remember, as a kid, adoring certain records, then hitting some total stinker somewhere on Side B and not being able to forgive the band for it.

For him, one weak song could ruin a whole album. It stained everything else.

Stipe’s goal for his time at Electric Lady was to finish three songs and also to record his half of a duet for an upcoming album by Courtney Love. But these were the first sessions he’d done in at least 15 months, and he needed to start by listening to everything again. Settling in, he spent a moment trolling through his laptop for his unfinished lyrics. “Master file. Solo album,” he said softly to himself, finally locating the folder.

Stipe was working with Andy LeMaster, a musician and producer based in Athens, Ga., who is also one his closest friends. (They met 25 years ago, Stipe told me, when Stipe photographed LeMaster’s then-boyfriend for “a series of people holding a potato that resembled the Venus of Willendorf that grew in my garden.”) They’d been writing the record together, mostly on synthesizers; Stipe does not play any instruments confidently, while LeMaster plays many. The songs were synth-infused, poppy, predominately danceable, and Stipe frequently found he had to explain this to people who assumed his new work would sound like R.E.M. More than once, I heard him put it this way: “I don’t want any electric guitars on this record. I had Peter Buck for 32 years. I don’t need any other electric guitars.”

The first two nights in the studio, Stipe’s concentration circled around a song called “I’m the Charge,” a catchy, clattering track in which his voice started in a medium-register growl then soared through the chorus, straining in the most compelling way against the churning underneath it. Listening to it felt like walking the length of a subway car that’s accelerating in the opposite direction. (I loved it.)

Stipe decided it needed a live drummer — someone like the drummer from LCD Soundsystem, he kept saying. Eventually, he decided to text LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy to inquire. “What do I say to James?” Stipe asked LeMaster, phone in hand. “Does he ever ‘sit in’? Is that what I would say?”

“Session work,” LeMaster instructed. The drummer, Pat Mahoney, would appear at the studio 24 hours later.

Two things became clear at Electric Lady, in parallel: the virtual limitlessness of Stipe’s creative opportunities, and how vulnerable he felt, how unsure of what he had. He’d gathered a small brain trust to listen with him. Among them were his boyfriend, Dozol — they had just celebrated their 25th anniversary — and his friend Tom Gilroy, a filmmaker and musician who wore a prayer-bead-style bracelet made of earbuds. Gilroy was the most vocal and bullish and full of freewheeling ideas. (He would send Stipe more feedback within a few hours, in the form of an eight-page essay.) He was adamant that one track, “Your Capricious Soul,” a version of which Stipe released as a single in 2019, would be a massive hit. “A statement song, like ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ or ‘Born This Way,’” Gilroy said. “Once kids hear what it’s about, it’s going to explode.”

I asked Gilroy what the song was about. He said, “It’s about a kid who’s discovering that they’re not cis.” But then he started elaborating, eventually offering a close-textual analysis of a line that seemed to catch Stipe by surprise and provoke an uncomfortable laugh.

I asked Stipe what the song was about. But Gilroy interrupted, scoffing at the futility of my question. “He’s going to say it’s about, like, a label manufacturer in Milwaukee,” Gilroy riffed. “‘It’s about a hardware store in Zimbabwe!”’

Stipe grinned and did not answer. Lightning flashed outside. Rain had swept in, soaking the Swifties.

Stipe returned to an idea he had to produce several different versions of each song on the record. He imagined one of “Your Capricious Soul” with just orchestra and voice. “It doesn’t even have to be my voice,” he said. “It could be a boys’ choir. A thems’ choir! Is there such a thing?”

LeMaster leaned forward in his chair, a notebook balanced on one thigh. “Do you want to put that on your list of things to explore?” he asked.

It was an unusual experience: being Michael Stipe, being in R.E.M., selling some 90 million albums, touring the world. The band was among the most acclaimed of its generation, and Stipe was always its most recognizable member. The face of R.E.M. was his face. In fact, that’s what his bandmate Mike Mills nicknamed him: Face. It was a way to laugh off how much more attention and adoration Stipe was getting versus the rest of the band. In Stipe’s memory, Mills came up with it after seeing a photo of Stipe standing next to an Indian guy, a six-foot Black woman with a cropped Afro, and some other random person. A caption writer, seeing Michael Stipe alongside three other human bodies, had labeled the photo “R.E.M.”

Stipe loved being in R.E.M. He loved being famous. It was also more punishing than his boyhood self, dreaming of singing in a band, had imagined. The group spent much of its career touring at a breakneck pace, first scrappily and strapped for cash and later as the center of a frenetic, industrial-scale production — both of which strained Stipe’s body and mental health. Mills told me: “Whether we liked it or not, the show lived or died through him. If Michael wasn’t on, then the show would suffer.” The job was leveraging whatever hypersensitivities and hyperactivity were already vibrating inside of him, but it also amplified them in dangerous ways.

Stipe had the insight to lay off drugs but found himself chewed up on tour by the explosions of adrenaline and subsequent crashes. By 1985, after five years and four records, the band had reached a new, more demanding level of success. But Stipe was sunk in a depression, tumbling through what he describes as a more than yearlong nervous breakdown. “I was exhausted. I was malnourished. And there was a virus that was killing men who slept with men dead — some men I knew. Some men I knew very well,” he said. “Every time I got a rash, or my glands got swollen, every time I got sick, I’d be like: ‘That’s it. It’s H.I.V.’

“I flipped. I lost it. I was cuckoo,” Stipe continued. He’d go off on various jags, trying starvation diets, enemas, purging. He performed surgeries on himself in hotel rooms to remove worrying marks from his skin. That summer, he shaved his head for the first time and shaved his eyebrows off too. He gained 30 pounds. At a festival in Belgium, he wore a disposable razor instead of a necktie. Then, he went blind.

Stipe had been neglecting his contact lenses for several months to the point that one of his corneas tore. The band was leaving Europe to start a West Coast tour. Stipe had to fly with his eyes bandaged, like a mummy, and was pushed in a wheelchair through their connection in Heathrow by his bandmates, who were all freaked out and confused. During a layover in New York, Stipe remembers eating a banana, but he believes that’s the only food he consumed for several days. He wasn’t saying much. He refused to take even an aspirin for the pain.

He was barely sleeping. But arriving in Seattle, Stipe took a nap. And when he woke up, he was finally able to remove the bandages. He looked out the window. He can still remember the way the sunlight hit the street. “Ten days in darkness had done something to me,” he remembered. He wrote two lyrics right away, “I Believe” and “These Days,” to capture the dream he just had and the resoluteness he suddenly felt. “I was better. I felt new. I had a purpose,” he said. “But then it happened again a few years later.”

It was Peter Buck who largely set the band’s pace. Buck told me: “I look at bands that are my contemporaries who, at some point, took a year off from recording and touring to go scuba diving. We didn’t know you could do that.” But it was also Buck who’d read all the cautionary tales in rock biographies and understood, from the outset, how to keep R.E.M. from tearing apart or burning out. This included splitting all songwriting credits equally, to short-circuit any quarrels about money, but also recognizing that the frontman in a band has a distinctly arduous job. And despite Stipe’s luminescent charisma onstage, aspects of the job didn’t come naturally to him. Buck understood that it was up to the other band members to help protect him and give him space to cope — not just because they loved Stipe but also because they wanted a long career.

By the time R.E.M. entered its epoch of megasuccess, beginning with the explosion of “Losing My Religion” in 1991, Stipe had learned to manage his limitations. Also, the culture had changed, and he had a lot more money; someone turned him on to acupuncture and massage and St. John’s wort, and it was easier for him to find healthful food on the road. But his celebrity was growing. The British press especially seemed determined to expose him as having AIDS, which he did not, and the media in general bumbled gracelessly around the question of his sexuality by tagging him with words like “enigmatic” or “mercurial.” In 1994, Stipe came out publicly as queer — a rarity in mainstream music at the time. In 2008, after his queerness randomly became news again, R.E.M. posted a video online in which Stipe read a stilted press release. He was there to announce, “after years of awkward speculation,” that the other members of R.E.M. were, in fact, straight. “I am happy for my bandmates and congratulate their candidness and their courage in making this bold statement,” he deadpanned.

Three years later, in 2011, R.E.M. amicably broke up. It all went away: no more touring. No more adrenaline. No calendar. No stress. For nearly 32 years, Stipe had been plugged into a particular socket. Now he was unplugged — it was as simple as that. When Rolling Stone asked if he planned to make a solo album, he answered, “It’s unfathomable to me right now.”

“I just folded my hands and sat for a while,” Stipe told me. Years passed. The journalists who still came sporadically to interview him would mention tallies of elapsed time — X number of years since the breakup; the 10-year anniversary of a particular album — and those numbers would catch him off guard: Had it really been that long?

Around 2015, Stipe stepped in to produce a record that his friends in the band Fischerspooner were struggling to finish. He, in turn, called in LeMaster as reinforcement, and while writing a song for the group, the two friends were astonished by the energy sparking between them. They decided to keep writing together, on their own. In 2019, Stipe started sporadically releasing singles, four of them over the course of five years, all to benefit climate groups. In 2020 he also collaborated with Aaron Dessner of the National, under the umbrella of Dessner’s side project, Big Red Machine, on a track called “No Time for Love Like Now.” Slowly, Stipe began feeling a deep compulsion to sing. The time had come, he told me, “to forge my own path with the Voice.”

“The Voice.” That’s how Stipe often refers to his own singing voice, an instrument that can range from gravelly and somber to a plaintive, nasal, belting cry — but is somehow always loaded with a startling density of emotion, blanketed in warmth. Calling it “the Voice” sounded to me a little pompous initially, but like “Face,” it stems from a private joke — a way for Stipe to put a buffer between himself and this other mysterious force. He insists it wasn’t until the last few years of R.E.M.’s career that he truly understood the distinctiveness of his own voice, and confessed at Electric Lady that he still doesn’t entirely comprehend “which version of the Voice people like. In a little bit of a calculated way, I try to figure it out. Like, ‘Well, these are the songs that people respond to, so which voice is that?’” Ultimately, the Voice feels like just another celebrity with whom he has a personal relationship, whose name drops into conversation from time to time.

He feels more pride in how he’s learned to wield the Voice. Stipe has a gift for shaping his delivery of a lyric to release words from their literal meanings, suspend them in pure emotion. He can sing lines like “You know with love comes strange currencies/And here is my appeal” for a stadium full of people who will all sing them back, and for whom, in that alchemical moment, those words mean something vital, mean everything, even if no one agrees what they mean.

Initially, Stipe thought of his voice purely as an instrument. He didn’t attach importance to words; the garbled string of nonsense phonemes he often sang, low in the mix on R.E.M.’s first two records, struck him as a valid approach. But he started to feel as if he owed the voice words it could sing with conviction. He owed that to listeners too. “He evolved,” Mills said. “As time goes on, you don’t want to use your voice as an instrument anymore. You want to use your voice as a voice, and your words as a message.” The message can still be opaque or impressionistic. But it must be honest and scrupulously wrought. Stipe told me, “We are brilliant enough machines that we can sense when something is genuine.”

With visual art, his process is freer, more impulsive. But lyrics demand rigor. “It’s your voice and your words, and that’s about as naked and personal as it can get,” he said. This was the major bottleneck for the new record. Stipe was daunted by the task of finding suitable lyrics for a new style of music, as well as by his own perfectionism; he couldn’t force himself to bear down and write. By the end of this summer, having not touched the music again since the Electric Lady sessions in May, Stipe worried the songs could become dated — the culture changes so fast — or start to feel stale, even to him. He had a list of singers with whom he wanted to collaborate, but he didn’t have words for them to sing. One track had the working title “Disco2018.” “That was [expletive] five years ago!” Stipe shouted. “Why have I not written anything for it?” In another case, he’d written one superb line — “Time keeps changing/rearranging/me” — but never found the next line. “So I’m stuck,” he said. “In what ways is time changing and rearranging me? And it’s been a year!” After worrying over it all circularly one afternoon, in response to my questions, he finally said: “All of this is an excuse. That’s part of what bugs me! I just need to finish it.”

Unhelpful feedback loops were establishing themselves. His impostor syndrome seemed to be surging. He compared himself with other frontmen who’d started solo careers, like Thom Yorke, of Radiohead: “Thom’s doing so much. I feel like this slacker compared to him,” he said. “I’m at a point in my life where you start thinking, OK, I’ve got a great voice and people like it, and it does good things when I sing,” he said. “So what do I do with that, and why am I just frittering away my days not doing it?”

Stipe was working with no record company, no timetable, no agenda but his own. He was energized by this structurelessness; he knew what pressure felt like from his former life in R.E.M. and was certain he didn’t want that again. And yet, because there were zero constraints on him, he started to feel thwarted, flattened, constrained. One day, in September, I was with him when he came across the phrase “dire wolf” on a plaque — the name of an extinct Pleistocene-era creature, new to him. Stipe paused to consider it. I could feel his attention spiraling away: dire wolf, dire wolf, dire wolf. He took a picture of the words.

My mind jammed, weighing the virtue of speaking up versus not speaking. Then I said it: There’s a Grateful Dead song called “Dire Wolf.” And Stipe, his body slackening, said, “Ah,” and ambled away. He would let the wolf go.

Stipe is not a big reader, but several times I heard him bring up a particular book to people he encountered. The book is called “Pretentiousness: Why It Matters.”

Its author, Dan Fox, works to separate pretentiousness from the many turnoffs the word conjures, like arrogance, self-absorption and snobbery. Pretentiousness itself is innocent, Fox argues; it shares a root with “pretending.” To be pretentious is to pretend to be larger or more sophisticated than you are, “overreaching what you’re capable of” until your capabilities catch up. In this sense, David Bowie was pretentious. John Lennon was pretentious. Fox asks us to imagine how impoverished the world would be if every young creative person were told that “it was pretentious for them to take an interest in literature, music, theater, gardening or cooking — that they could only be true to the circumstances into which they’d been born.”

After hearing Stipe mention the book so many times, I read it and was excited, when we reconnected last fall, to discuss it with him. But right away, Stipe told me, “I never finished the book, to be completely honest with you.” Talking up a book on pretentiousness you never finished feels extremely pretentious, yet he volunteered this information without embarrassment — which might be the least pretentious thing I’d ever heard.

Regardless, the premise appealed to Stipe. He liked celebrating pretentiousness because pretentiousness had propelled his own life forward. From a young age, he recognized that he fit oddly within the version of normal being offered to him by his surroundings — even before he hit puberty and realized he was queer. Then, when he was 15, he bought Patti Smith’s new record, “Horses,” stayed up all night listening to it while eating an enormous bowl of cherries, threw up (from all the cherries) and went to school. At some point during the night, Stipe decided that’s what he was going to do. Whichever world this music, and this unusual creature named Patti Smith, sprang from was the world that he belonged in. He just needed a band to get there.

Twenty years later, in 1995, Stipe was on a yearlong world tour with that band and found himself at a bar in Spain drinking bootlegged absinthe. He realized it was Valentine’s Day. He realized also that this would be Patti Smith’s first Valentine’s Day without her husband, Fred (Sonic) Smith, the guitarist of the MC5 who died several months earlier at age 46. A hard day, surely. He wondered if Patti Smith would appreciate a call.

Stipe had never met Smith. But he knew someone who had her phone number, and he was on tour — which is to say, he was the version of himself that hummed, 24/7, with the brazenness, the fearlessness, the pretentiousness, that was required of him every night onstage. It felt as if he were hurling himself off a cliff as he dialed her home in Detroit. And when Smith picked up, he blurted: “This is Michael Stipe. I wouldn’t be calling except that I’m completely drunk on absinthe.”

Here’s what he did not know:

The Smiths — Patti and Fred — didn’t listen to a lot of new music. But Fred liked to check in with MTV occasionally, and sometime in the late ’80s, Patti caught R.E.M.’s video for “The One I Love,” in which Stipe lays his head in a wispy woman’s lap. The image reminded Smith of her storied relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; it made her feel a strange pull to the singer on the screen. By the time “Losing My Religion” broke and Stipe seemed to be on MTV almost hourly, Fred knew to call in Patti from the other room. “He knew that I had such a crush on Michael,” Smith told me. “Fred used to shout: “Trisha! Your boy is on!”

Now Smith’s husband was gone and her boy was — improbably — on the phone, cold-calling just to say he was thinking about her, what her music meant to him, that he hoped she was OK. The gesture touched Smith, immeasurably. Months later, Stipe invited Smith to an R.E.M. show in Michigan. “I hadn’t been out of the house very much after Fred died,” Smith told me. “And certainly not at a concert. I was living a very quiet life.” Standing in the crowd while thousands of people sang along to “Man on the Moon,” she began to cry.

Smith was recounting the story over dinner with Stipe one night in September. They were at a restaurant in Covington, Ky., just across the river from Cincinnati, where Smith had a gig the following night. Stipe had accompanied her from New York. It was Fred Smith’s birthday — he would have been 75 — and the heaviness of his loss and the delight in his memory seemed to smear together, coloring the whole night.

Watching Smith and Stipe together over the next couple of days, I found myself wishing the English language had words to capture all possible varieties of friendship, because theirs felt so specific. He doted on her, like a valet. She worried after him and took pleasure in poking a little fun. At dinner, Smith kept turning away to cough, and each time, Stipe would tactfully pass an open container of homeopathic lozenges across the table. When, during another meal, Stipe told the server: “I’m going to have the niçoise salad, but I’ll open with the buffalo mozzarella,” Smith chortled and teased: “Open with!” Then, when Smith left the room, Stipe turned to me, beaming, and said, “Isn’t she amazing?”

Smith was playing a festival in downtown Cincinnati organized and headlined by the National. For an hour, as the sun went down, she tramped around the stage in chunky black boots, mashing her pelvis into the air, into the music, while she spelled out “G-L-O-R-I-A.” And the whole time she was out there, being Patti Smith, Stipe watched from the side of the stage, in a “PATTI SMITH LOCAL CREW” T-shirt, being the world’s most energetic Patti Smith fan: snapping pictures, crossing and recrossing his arms as he bounded around to take her in from every possible angle. Later in the night, Smith reappeared to sing a song with the National but lost her grasp on the melody and timing momentarily. Walking off, she seemed slightly shellshocked, sapped of her superpowers, like a 76-year-old person for the first time all night. Stipe stepped forward to offer her a bottle of water. Smith whispered something to him, and he laughed, and there in the wings, washed in music, with the edges of the National’s stage lighting splashing over them, they stood still and hugged for a very long time.

The National had asked Stipe to perform a song with them too. But Stipe declined. He didn’t feel great in his body, he told me — he was 15 pounds too heavy, he said — and didn’t want to be photographed onstage. Stipe had been one of the National’s musical heroes since they were young; The National’s bassist, Scott Devendorf, told me that, as kids from Ohio, they found it empowering that R.E.M. was from Georgia and not New York or Los Angeles. Then, in 2008, the National opened for R.E.M. on what was ultimately the band’s final tour. They befriended Stipe and benefited from his guidance. (The National’s singer, Matt Berninger, has described the album his band made after that tour as “us following all of Michael’s advice.”) Aaron Dessner of the National told me, “I try not to be a fan, because we’re friends.” But Dessner loves Stipe’s voice so much, he said, that sometimes just listening to a voice memo from Stipe makes him have to go listen to a bunch of R.E.M.

Arms kept springing wide open when Stipe first arrived backstage that afternoon: a superbloom of hugs. “How’s the music going?” Dessner asked. “Annoying!” Stipe said. “I want it to be done.” Dessner’s twin brother, Bryce, who also plays in the National and is a classically trained composer, asked if Stipe was still interested in him writing string arrangements for the new songs. Stipe said yes, but his body language turned sheepish. “Send them to me, and I’ll do it,” Bryce said firmly. He locked eyes with Stipe to signal he was serious; Stipe should treat the offer seriously, too. Later that night, within minutes of finishing their two-and-a half-hour set, both brothers were in a corner of the greenroom, attending to Stipe, asking him if he wanted a beer, what type of beer; asking him to tell them about meeting Andy Warhol, if he’d ever met Freddie Mercury — and on and on. Bryce pulled me aside to show me a chic, lightweight suit hanging in his road case. “I flew here with an Acne suit because I knew Michael would be here,” he said.

All night, it was palpable and heartwarming: the affection and admiration pooling around Smith and Stipe and the Dessners too. It flowed in all directions, but most powerfully upward, from youngest to oldest — a chain of influences embodied as friendships. In my mind, it had something to do with the pretentiousness book, with how certain people — artists especially, but not exclusively — form and reform themselves as they age. Fifty years ago, Stipe reached toward an image beyond the small square of reality in which he was raised. And he got there, he did it — all while forging an identity that was indisputably his own. But now, with his solo record, he was struggling to transcend the limitations of that reality, reaching for something else, something unknown that he could locate only within himself.

When I explained this theory to Stipe, it seemed to resonate. “Everybody here comes from somewhere that they would just as soon forget and disguise,” he said. He was quoting an R.E.M. song — quoting himself — but wasn’t sure he remembered it exactly right.

Stipe flew from Cincinnati to Athens, the college town where he and his family moved when he was a teenager and where Stipe still has a home. R.E.M. formed in Athens. Great rivers of R.E.M. lore rush under every inch of the city. Stipe narrated his site-specific memories as we drove around town.

Stipe’s mother and two sisters still live in Athens, as does his uncle. (His father died in 2015.) The family is extremely close and unrestrainedly loving. They stay in frequent touch throughout the day. One morning, on a FaceTime call with his mother, Marianne, Stipe got distracted by one of her shiny earrings and asked where she got it. “You gave it to me!” she said laughing, and he broke into laughter, too. “I think it’s lovely,” she said. “You’re going to keep trying to make me classy.”

“You’re already classy,” Stipe said.

“Well, I love my Michael,” his mother said, laughing and laughing.

“And I love my mom,” Stipe said. And then they both went mwah, mwah, mwah, blowing kisses at each other, and Stipe stayed on a few beats longer, making sure his mother found the right button to end the call.

One afternoon, Stipe’s sister Cyndy was over, and Marianne pulled in, issuing three short honks — a family tradition, code for the words “I love you.” She brought a homemade apple tart, which Stipe eagerly unwrapped to get a look at, then whispered “Yes” just to himself. Marianne worried it might not be sweet enough. “With apples,” she noted, “it’s hard to predict.”

Marianne Stipe is 87, steady and serene, with the same ethereal blue eyes as her son. When strangers ask Mrs. Stipe if she knows Michael Stipe, she usually says, “I’ve heard of him,” she told me. But then she smiled in a way that, it seemed to me, would instantly give the secret away. When I asked if she’d heard any of Michael’s new music, she smiled again, and this smile kept expanding and expanding — until she pursed her lips and glanced at her son, unsure if she was allowed to say more.

Something had opened up for Stipe after Cincinnati. His internal weather was shifting. It had been years since he’d seen any live music, and certainly since he’d hung around backstage with friends. “It was familiar in a way that felt really welcoming and encouraging,” he said. He felt a certain, specialized sense memory rekindling. His body knew exactly how to step over cables, precisely when to leave a dressing room so the band could have a moment together before taking the stage. “I don’t know if ‘wistful’ is the word,” Stipe said. “It was a pang of emotion that made me miss that. ‘Pining’ is the word. It never goes away, but sometimes it smacks you in the face.”

He woke up the next day with words in his head — words that rhymed — and scribbled them in his notebook. Then, listening to some of his new songs at LeMaster’s studio in Athens, he had to leave the room to scribble others. They were awful, as lyrics, he said, but they were what his mind was generating, and he needed to honor that, to allow the muscle to exercise itself freely again. “I have to be unafraid,” he said.

Over the next few days in Athens, I watched unfold in real time what a Hollywood film might condense into a montage. Stipe insisted on going on long walks every night to take off his extra weight. He charged uphill. He checked his pulse. Leaving the house once, he spontaneously sang a line from the National song “Fake Empire” — one of the only times I heard him sing.

You could feel him hurtling toward the unpleasant thing he’d been resisting. He knew he’d have to isolate himself in one of the buildings on his property, walk in circles for six or eight or 10 hours at a time, effect a trancelike meditation and wrench out the rest of the lyrics, line by line. That’s how he’d always done it, ever since his blindness episode. He turned his body into a fidget spinner so his mind could do the work.

“I have a deadline now,” he announced to his mother and sister. While he was glad to be liberated from the stressors he’d felt with R.E.M., he told them, without any such pressure, “I could keep working on this record for a decade and let my insecurities get the better of me.” He had plans to travel to see a friend later in the year, he explained — a renowned musician who’d given him four tracks to turn into songs for his album. But more than a year had passed, and the friend still hadn’t heard a note of any finished music in return. Stipe assumed his friend was curious — maybe even concerned. “But he’s enough of a gentleman not to ask.” So, Stipe wanted to give him one or two of those songs when they saw each other, complete with lyrics. “I’m using that as a deadline,” he told his mom and sister, “to pressure myself to go next door and walk in circles and get some damn lyrics done.”

Marianne sat across the table from him with supreme poise, somehow broadcasting with only the subtlest nod that she accepted as inevitable what her son was telling her. The words would rise, the way the sun and the moon always did. “It’ll come easy,” his mother said.

He did not make his deadline.

But ending there would be misleading — unfair. Because, Stipe told me the other day, “I did come out of my terrible writer’s block. I completely flourished as a writer after that.” He was nearly done with two of those songs now, including “Time Keeps Changing.” He’d been carrying around pages of the lyrics with him for days.

“We can say for the piece that I finished the songs, and by God, I will finish them before the piece comes out,” he said. “How about that? Let’s leave the piece closing with: I finished the songs.”

Jon Mooallem has been a contributing writer for the magazine for nearly two decades. He is the author of three books: “Wild Ones,” about looking at people looking at animals; “This Is Chance!” on the 1964 Alaska earthquake; and “Serious Face,” which included a decade’s worth of Times Magazine articles. This is his last feature before he assumes a position as obituary and features writer for The Wall Street Journal. Christopher Anderson is the author of nine books of photography, including “Odyssey,” published last month. He lives in Paris.