Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music now. I'm here with Rob Sheffield and I think we're going to go right into Rob's conversation with Michael Stipe, formerly of R.A. M.

I loved the song you did last year with Aaron Desner from the National.

No time for love like now.

It was really an astounding song, but it sounded kind of like an artistic renewal in a way.

Yeah, he's amazing and it was such a great pleasure to be able to work with him and

that piece of music just wanted the voice so I gave it one what's so weird about what's so

super weird about the song is it mentions lockdown and it

mentions this in-between place and I wrote it before COVID. You know none of us

have any idea what was coming of course but it's a little weirdly precedent that song it freaks me out a little bit still that in the

lyric is a little bit of a description of what we've all been going through now for a year

but I finished it in November of 2019. Yeah. That's amazing because it

sounds like a COVID song. I mean I mentioned lockdown in the song. It actually is a little

freaky to tell you the truth. Do you hear your voice again in a song like this and all the songs that you've released in the last couple of years?

For a long-time fan like me raises the question of whether you're just falling back in love with making music again.

Yeah, I had to really step away from it for a while after Ari understanding.

I just had immersed myself so completely and everything that it took to, you know, to give Ariam everything that it took to, to give R.E. M. everything that I would require as kind of a lead singer,

control freak. I needed to be all in or not at all. When we decided to disband, I just needed to really step away from music for a while. And, you know, I took about five years and then kind of accidentally brought myself back into it. So it feels good to write. I'm composing for the first time in my life this past year and a half or so. And I'm really pleased with the results. Anyone who is expecting some version of Oregon don't expect that because you're not going to do it.

Just go find something else that you like, but I'm pretty pleased with the results of our work.

It doesn't sound like recapitulating the past, it sounds sort of like you're reaching for a new kind of future.

I've never composed music before. I always had Peter and Mike and Bill to do that for me

and so this presents a whole new, I mean I played classical piano as a child and then I stopped and I completely forgot it. I used to read music I could do hand over hand. So somewhere in there is some understanding of opposition,

but I came at it as someone who was always presented

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