There are not many positives to be drawn from R.E.M. splitting up back in 2011, but there are a few little morsels to cling on to. One is that the Athens, Georgia legends barely put a foot wrong throughout three decades as a band so we’ll have to assume that this was another right call. Speaking to this writer a few years ago, coincidentally on the 10th anniversary of the day that Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills announced the end of the band, Stipe said it had been a tough, much-mulled over decision.
“It was very sad,” stated the singer. “Of course, it was very bittersweet and not an easy decision for us to arrive at. But looking back, I can speak on behalf of everyone, we made the right choice and we did the right thing.”
Which brings us to the second (and final?) positive little tidbit that emerged from R.E.M. calling it a day. That is that in the intervening period, the space has given Stipe the necessary room to look back and evaluate his own band’s work, as he has done in interviews to accompany a number of R.E.M. reissues over the past few years.
Immersing himself in the past, he told me, was not a trip he normally embarked on. “I’m not someone who naturally looks back,” said Stipe. “I despise nostalgia and I’m a naturally sentimental person so of course I abhor sentimentality. But, that said, I am the guy that penned Everybody Hurts, to put it in its place. I have to say that being able to listen to and talk about material 20 or 25 year on has been really eye-opening for me. It feels fresh. I’m able to examine, from a great distance thanks to time, my own work and look at it not from the perspective of having just done it and having regrets or having just done it and being really proud of it or excited about what happens, but looking back and going, ‘Well, that was a bit of a mis-step but these aspects were triumphant’.”
Stipe said he was of the opinion that R.E.M. never presented “B-level” work. “Every record that we’ve made, we did the very best,” he said. “When we released stuff, it was in my opinion and my mind the absolute best thing that we could possibly create at that moment.”
Those anniversaries keep coming thick and fast – last year, they celebrated the 25th anniversary of 1998’s transformative Up and later this month, their 1994 return to rock moment Monster turns 30, followed in a few weeks by the 20th anniversary of 2004’s Around The Sun. But it can’t all be looking back. At the time we spoke in 2021, Stipe was hard at work on his solo album. Here’s hoping it sees the light of day sometime soon.
