Have you been wondering what the frontman of R.E.M. is up to these days? Me too. And veteran feature-writer Jon Mooallem has answers in this profile, his last project at The New York Times Magazine before he takes his talents to The Wall Street Journal. Here’s a scene with music producer Jack Antonoff and Matty Healy of the band 1975 (yes, Taylor Swift is also in the story):
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.
Get the Longreads Weekly Email