Tucker started playing piano and then guitar, and when her family relocated to the college town of Eugene, Oregon, she started playing music with friends, forming a band called This That. Graduating from high school in the spring of 1990, Tucker planned to attend the Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, in the fall. She’d done well enough in her classes to feel ready for undergraduate academics. But to prepare for what she already anticipated would be an equally important part of her next few years, Tucker and her friend Tracy Sawyer decided to spend the summer in a college town with a rich music scene.

  “I was obsessed with R.E.M., so we went to Athens.” Tucker had worked at a restaurant in Eugene and got to Georgia with enough money to spend the summer days hanging out in cafés and the nights in the bars and halls where the local bands played. She and Sawyer, who was also bound for Evergreen, got to know as many musicians as they could, becoming particularly friendly with a band called the Earthworms. And of course they were aware of the town’s reigning band, just then in the process of making the album that would project Athens’s art-rock ethic into the uppermost reaches of mainstream music and popular culture. “R.E.M. was so smart about how they did things,” Tucker says. “They were really conscious of not just the music they made, but the whole business around it. They were thoughtful of how they presented themselves, of being leaders for young people who wanted to be musicians, and not representative of the worst things in capitalist culture. They decided to do it completely differently. And you have to give them credit for building that path.”[1]

  For Tucker and Sawyer, the path began in Olympia, where they formed a band called Heavens to Betsy and became part of the surging riot grrrl scene, along with Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and a variety of queercore bands, including Team Dresch and the Third Sex. When Tucker met Carrie Brownstein at a Heavens to Betsy show in the northern Washington college town of Bellingham, they formed Sleater-Kinney and went on to become one of the most popular and influential American post-punk bands of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century.

  The riot grrrl bands didn’t sound much like R.E.M., but the established band’s trademark combination of post-punk fire, folk-rock guitar chime, literate lyrics, and emotive vocals radiated across the pop music spectrum, from the indie bands steering their overloaded vans from one tiny club to another to the vertiginous altitudes where artistically willful superstars like Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey make whatever music they want to make, whenever they want to make it.

  * * *

  —

  As work on the new R.E.M. album continued through the first half of 2010, there was a growing understanding within the group that it would be their last. After all, it was the fifth of the five albums they owed Warner Bros. The scene they all described later, always with words like “mutual” and “friendly” and “amicable,” went like this: At some point during the sessions, Michael looked at his bandmates. “I think you guys will understand, I need to be away from this for a long time.” Peter nodded. “How about forever?” Which Mike seconded. “Sounds right to me.” And that, according to the account Peter gave New York magazine in 2016, was that.

  Was it, really?

  One of the things that makes R.E.M. unique, particularly among bands that got to be as famous as they did, was how accomplished they were at not talking about themselves. Yes, they’d talk about their work—the joys and challenges of touring, how they wrote these songs, what they tried to capture on the new record. If there’d been trouble along the way, one or more of them would tell that story. About the times they disagreed, how there’d been an argument and maybe they’d even shouted something about breaking up and stormed off to sulk. But those stories always ended in rapprochement, renewed friendship, a stronger collaboration. When the band members gave separate interviews, they all tended to tell the same stories, often using the same language, as if they were reading from the same talking points. Or maybe they all remembered things in exactly the same way. It’s possible.

  But who knows? Go back through all the interviews they gave between 1981 and 2011 in search of firsthand descriptions of how it felt to be in R.E.M., from the emotional currents that fueled their artistry to the forces that resulted in their decision to break up, and what you’ll find is: nearly nothing. It’s kind of amazing that they managed to be so very famous for so very long and yet never surrendered anything beyond the most cursory details of their childhoods, their families, and their romantic lives. Peter was married twice during the band’s run, both times to women who co-owned nightclubs (the first in Athens, the second in Seattle), and if he acknowledged his spouses’ existence, he never said much else about them. Bill introduced his wife Mari to a few reporters during interviews in the mid-1980s but left it at that. Mike had serious girlfriends, one of whom gave birth to his son in 1989, but he never spoke of them. Certainly it was easier for the instrumentalists to keep their private lives to themselves. After all, they had Michael standing in front, absorbing the spotlight. And also the abuse.

  * * *

  —

  Some of the new songs they were working on in 2010 take zippy little trips to nowhere. “That Someone Is You” wants to evoke the 40 Watt on a sweaty Saturday night in 1981, but there’s not a lot of there there. It makes juvenilia like Bill’s 1980 goof “Narrator” seem substantive by comparison. Still, the biggest miscue, and perhaps the most vivid argument that R.E.M. had finally run out of ideas, comes on the final track. “Blue” began as so many great R.E.M. songs had, as a studio jam that came out of nowhere, the music emerging less from the musicians’ imaginations than from the murky boil of their emotions. They picked up their instruments, someone strummed a chord, and they all followed him into the void.

  They’d done it just like that twenty years earlier, when Peter, Mike, and Bill found their way into “Country Feedback.” That time, the process was just as miraculous as the results. According to legend, Michael had come into the rehearsal space as they were banging away, already tuned in to their frequency. He grabbed a microphone, located a melody, and improvised lyrics that were as fucked up and beautiful as the music. It’s crazy what you could have had, he chanted. I need this, I need this. Did he really just make it up on the spot and spit it out fully formed? That’s what they said later, and it could be true. What matters more is how perfectly the parts work together. “Country Feedback” was and remains an epic achievement. They played it onstage consistently through the years, and it was not an accident that it was one of their final encores at their last show in Mexico City.

  Unfortunately, the attempt to reawaken the “Country Feedback” spell twenty years later falls flat. It doesn’t help that the chord progression they came up with for “Blue” is only a slight variation of the one they built into the earlier song. For God’s sake, it’s even in the same key. This time there was no direct synchronicity with their singer. To get Michael’s voice on the piece, Jacknife Lee flew in a recitation the singer had recorded months earlier. I am made by my times, part of it went. I am a creation of now. Except suddenly it didn’t sound like it anymore. To provide some melody, they had Patti Smith sing over the chorus, much like she’d done on “E-Bow the Letter” fifteen years earlier. It would have been a disheartening way for it all to end, were it not for the unexpected reprise of the album’s first song, which stands among the most powerful pieces of music they ever recorded.

  * * *

  —

  It was always Michael’s burden. Being the voice, and the face, the storyteller. The personification of the music, the animation of the songs. The secret of R.E.M.’s success, the difference between a good band and a great one. They would give him pieces of catchy music and he would turn them into unforgettable songs. Then spellbinding performances. First in recording studios, then on stages all around the world. The world gave him and his band its attention, and then its love. And all the world wanted from him in exchange was everything he had. Which is what he’d given.

  By the time they got to Berlin in the third week of June of 2010, the three band members knew they were on their last go-round. But they kept it to themselves, so when the directors Lance Bangs and Dominic DeJoseph came in to film live, in-studio performances of a few of the new songs at Hansa Studio, only the three musicians at the center of the big paneled room knew the significance of the moment. Scott McCaughey and Bill Rieflin were with them too, along with Bertis Downs and a couple dozen friends standing or perching on the packing cases along the edge while they played the new songs. “Oh My Heart,” “All the Best,” “Mine Smell Like Honey,” “Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter,” a couple more. All of it leading to the song they’d use as the album’s leadoff track, the one Michael called “Discoverer.” This would be the last song R.E.M. ever played.

  * * *

  —

  Here was R.E.M., one last time. Peter in black from head to foot, sawing at the strings of his black Rickenbacker. His hair mostly still dark, but fringed with silver. Mike stood across from him with his blond Fender bass, his hair back to being short, rectangular glasses reflecting the lights. Neither musician was as skinny as he used to be, but such is age, such were the banquets celebrating so many triumphs. Then there was Michael. A charcoal blazer over a striped button-up shirt, over black warm-up pants over worn-in white sneakers. Head shaved, cheeks mossed with salt-and-pepper stubble, thicker and whiter around his chin, horn-rimmed specs completing the look: less the hungry young artist, more the successful gallery owner, nodding his head to the martial blare his bandmates, along with Rieflin and McCaughey, were making. When the verse came around, the singer bore down and let fly.

  Hey baby, this is not a challenge, it just means I love you as much as I always said I did…

  More than three decades since he first stood at a microphone flanked by the other members of R.E.M., fifteen albums into a career that set new standards for creativity, mythmaking, and willful obscurity, “Discoverer” was about laying himself bare. As ever, he was a little vague on the particulars, sketching the sweep of his adulthood in a series of signal moments. A time he made a mistake and was pilloried for his lapse. An evening spent with vodka in one hand and espresso in the other, revelation in the air and disaster dead ahead. Michael regarded it all with equal measures of pride, regret, and awe. Mostly the latter, particularly when he recalled that long-ago spring break in New York, the moment he looked up from a crosswalk and saw the epic city skyline rising from his feet.

  Now the song was coming to its climax and he took a step back from the microphone, his head slightly back, throat open as he sang as hard and loud as he could. Singing, finally, about himself. Who he was, who he’d been at the start, who he’d been the entire time.

  Discoverer!

  Really belting it out, his eyes shut, his throat corded with muscle.

  Discoverer!

  Again, and again and again, that one word, the truest thing he could say about himself.

  Discoverer! Discoverer! Ohhh! Discoverer! Ohh! Discovererrrrrrrrr!

  When it was finally over, as the last notes echoed and faded into the ornate wooden ceiling, Michael gripped the microphone with one hand, nodded, and sank to his knees. Head down, reaching for breath, he took a moment to collect himself, then stood up again, his face alight, eyes shimmering with tears. Then he turned to his bandmates and started to applaud.

  49

  Let’s All Get On with It

  They kept it a secret for more than a year.

  When Collapse into Now was released on March 7, 2011, there was no indication that R.E.M.’s fifteenth album would be its last. It earned the usual solid reviews from critics and scaled the world’s record sales charts in the usual way, peaking instantly at number five in the United States and the United Kingdom and at various stations of the top tens throughout Europe, Asia, and the antipodes before making a quick descent, finishing its run without notching much in the way of gold, let alone platinum, sales marks. It might have made a bigger splash if the band members had trumpeted its release as R.E.M.’s final word. But of course they didn’t do that.

  Instead they held off for six months, letting the album run its course before they released their official statement on September 21. There would be no final tour, no climactic performance to pay tribute to their fans, to their career, to who they were when they got together and projected themselves into the music only they could make in quite that way. That, they said, was already over. They had already called it a day and had parted the same way they came together: as friends. In interviews they fessed up to all the clues they’d dropped into, and on the packaging of, the final album, starting with its title. Then there was that line in “Discoverer,” the part about It was what it was / Let’s all get on with it. And how about the cover, which had been the first ever to feature a recognizable portrait of all its extant members. And hadn’t anyone noticed that Michael, standing at the center with his hand raised to the camera and thus the world, was waving goodbye?

  * * *

  —

  Being famous, even for a brief period, sticks with you. It changes the way people look at you, and how you look at yourself. The experience of being both larger than life and, in some abstract but painfully obvious way, less than human does strange things to a person’s psyche. It’s possible to recover, to reconfigure your memories of large-scale notoriety into the fragments of some weird dream you once had. But maybe that’s easier said than done. And who really wants to forget how it feels to be that beloved, even if for all the wrong reasons? Or maybe just some of the wrong reasons. Because what you did was pretty good, wasn’t it? And if it was, then you must not be all that bad, either. It’s good to remember this some nights. The long, dark ones that remind you of why you felt so compelled to become so famous in the first place. Because no amount of success ever really chases those away.

  * * *

  —

  For most of the 2010s, Michael Stipe kept his distance from music and from all but the most occasional jaunts into the public eye. He settled down with Thomas Dozol, an art photographer, at some point in the mid-2000s—he’s the boyfriend Michael thanked at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—and, about ten years later, started wearing a wedding ring and referring to Dozol as “the mister.” The couple divide their time between New York City, Berlin, and Athens, where they live in the same house Michael has owned since the 1980s. It’s on the same block as his mother and sister, around the corner from Mike Mills, and just a few blocks from R.E.M.’s once and ongoing adviser Bertis Downs.

  R.E.M.’s former singer focuses most of his attention on visual art, making photographs, sculpture, and whatever else tickles his fancy. He has published three books of photography in recent years, including one collaboration with author Douglas Coupland. For the first eight or so years after the band separated, he hardly ever sang in public, which seemed particularly sad when he made one of his occasional appearances, because that was when you remembered how great his voice is, and how much you missed hearing it. Then in 2019 he released “Your Capricious Soul,” a largely synth-based song that sounded pretty much exactly like what you would have expected a solo Michael Stipe would sound like in 2019. A full album would come eventually, he said, with no promises as to how eventual that would be. A second song, “Drive to the Ocean,” came out in 2020, and it was followed a few months later by “No Time for Love Like Now.” A collaboration with Big Red Machine, a side project of Aaron Dessner, guitarist for the National, the song emerged a few weeks after the start of the COVID pandemic, and Michael’s public performances of the song, all on television, were videotaped solo shots, singing over a recorded backing. Michael says he’s still working on his album, but when it will be done is anyone’s guess.

  For a few years Michael cultivated a long silver beard that gave him a kind of severe Old Testament appearance. It was the face of a shepherd who had steered his flock through decades, perhaps centuries, of pestilence and floods. Then he shaved and his sweet smile reemerged, along with that mischievous sparkle in his eyes. In his early sixties, Michael Stipe has the look of a kindhearted man who has a lot of fun.

  * * *

  —

  Michael’s central presence in the public sphere is on Instagram, where he posts frequently, usually putting up batches of photographs he’s made to document his most recent meanderings and adventures. A gallery exhibition in Paris, street scenes in London, the annual Pride parade in Athens, Georgia. The shots tend to be artful, demonstrating an exceedingly sharp eye for composition and texture, with an equally acute sense of whimsy. On one recent day he posted images from a junkyard he happened to see. A beat-up piece of plywood with the words Do Not Use painted on it, another hunk reading No. A rusty, lichen-coated mailbox only just hanging on to its platform, a corner of what appears to be a piece of junk mail just visible within. Almost all of the pictures are striking. So is the number of self-portraits that usually come with the day’s posts. The former R.E.M. singer, it seems, is still accustomed to the spotlight, and still enjoys presenting his visage for public consumption. So much that in 2024 he made his debut as a model, serving as one of the faces for Yves Saint Laurent’s spring collection.