When Michael Stipe was a child, living in a modest house on Medlock Lane, in Decatur, Georgia, he liked to go in the yard and play with roly-polies. These tiny garden creatures, sometimes known as pill bugs or armadillo bugs, are not actually bugs at all, but small crustaceans that feed on decomposed plant matter. Stipe has led an itinerant life. His father was in the Army, which meant his childhood was a consistent churn of new addresses: Georgia, Texas, Germany, Alabama, Illinois.
He and the band he led for more than 30 years are forever associated with Athens, Georgia, and Stipe lived there for a decade or so between the ages of 18 and 27, but even during that time, he was hardly rooted to the place.
He wanted to be near his mother, who has had some health issues, but the pandemic lockdown meant living in Athens for the longest block of time he had in many years. He admits that his peripatetic life has left him ill-suited to discern the changes the town and the state have undergone over the last six decades, but there is one he noticed.
It never washes off. But it also felt like a tidy way to start thinking about the passage of time. How we deal with those changes is kind of everything. More than any other group, R. The band sold more than 90 million albums without ever seeming to compromise its musical vision or pander to its fans. Since then, Stipe has been steadfast in waving off any hint of a return for the band, and unlike many other artists of his vintage whose reunion denials always seem to imply a nod, a wink, and the hope of a large check from Coachella or Lollapalooza, you get the feeling the former R.
His voice has the same warm, quietly authoritative timbre recognizable from three decades of R. But it was all-encompassing, and it was exhausting. I was really tired after 32 years. It was a lot. T-shirt by Vote. Clipboard from Mr. Ginn, father of Greg Ginn and Raymond Pettibon. Self-portrait by Michael Stipe. He starts with photos he took back in for a project called Future Epicenter.
