I’ve agreed to meet Michael Stipe at Otto, once the site of the restaurant One Fifth, where Andy Warhol held court and Saturday Night Live threw coke-fueled after-parties in its early days. A couple dozen floors above, Robert Mapplethorpe shot the cover of one of Stipe’s favorite albums, Patti Smith’s Horses. Now the space belongs to Stipe’s pal, celebrity chef Mario Batali. Stipe steps out of a cab wearing a jacket, sweater, and cracked black sneakers so old and funky he kind of looks down on his luck, yet helplessly stylish at the same time. It’s unclear if the maîtresse d’ knows who he is,

but she can tell he’s famous.

Stipe, as one might imagine, is a complicated guy. Though

he’s astonishingly personable, he’s sensitive, on red alert for slights, compliments, and everything in between. Most

people stifle those frequencies so that they can get on with

their lives, but you get the feeling that Stipe stays tuned in for the sake of his art. He receives praise as if you had just

put a gold ingot in his hand, and the reverse holds true, as

well: At one point, I suggest that while their recent albums

were a bit insular, Accelerate sounds as if it were made with the audience in mind, and he almost switches off the

recorder. “Well, see, that’s my insecurities, misinterpreting

what you’re saying,” he says once we’ve smoothed it over.

“Sorry. They’re with us all the time. Sometimes you can’t see them, but they’re there.”

He speaks with a quietly urgent earnestness, as if he were

telling you that you’ve just ingested some fatal poison, but

that if we act quickly, we can find the antidote. He spends most of his time doing band business, plus wheeling and

dealing on behalf of his two film production companies and

his charity work. Then there’s his photography—he posted a

photo every day of 2007 at futurepicenter.com—and, lately, sculpture (“I’m working in bronze right now”). “Un Bel di

Vedremo,” the famous aria from Madame Butterfly, comes

swelling out of the restaurant’s sound system; Stipe suddenly

stops talking, closes his eyes, and lifts his chin to the music like he’s expecting the fat lady to give him a kiss. “Do you

remember Malcolm McLaren’s disco version of that?” he

finally says, safely back to earth. “Fucking great.”

The only time Stipe really takes a break is when he heads to Europe most summers with his boyfriend. Following a

long period of speculation about his sexuality, during which

he was stubbornly coy and ambiguous, Stipe has been out

for years but has rarely publicly discussed the topic in any depth. “It was supercomplicated for me in the ’80s,” he

says. “I was totally open with the band and my family and

my friends and certainly the people I was sleeping with. I thought it was pretty obvious.”

Going public was a little easier when he realized it might

inspire people to change their views about homosexuality.

“I didn’t always see that,” he says. “But I see now, of course that’s the case, of course that’s needed. I’d just never felt strongly enough about a particular relationship to

“We learned a big lesson from that last record,” Mills will say. “You’ve got to focus.”

What’s even funnier is that the cover of The Last Record is a photo of the band,

totally blurry.

“[Michael and Mike] sometimes resent me for pushing them to work more,” Buck says of the band’s dynamic. “And I kind of resent that I have time off that I don’t

necessarily want. But you’ve got to balance it—the world doesn’t want an R.E.M.

record every year. I’d love to do it, but that’s not the way it works anymore.”

Winter darkness begins to fill the hotel room, and Buck’s foot still wags restlessly. “I’m always obsessed with the passage of time,” he says. “How much more

of this do I get? I just couldn’t imagine ever again spending that much time doing

something I didn’t like the end result of.”

say, ‘Yeah, he’s my boyfriend, that is what it is.’ Now I

recognize that to have public figures be very open about their sexuality helps some kid somewhere out there.”

But how does that sensibility surface in his work? “Growing up, I was always

drawn to songs that were gender-unspecific,” he says. “There are songs I wrote in

the past that were gender-specific. [Reckoning’s] ‘ 7 Chinese Brothers’ was about me breaking up a couple—and then dating both of them, a man and a woman,

which is a terrible thing to do, but I was young and stupid. ‘So. Central Rain’ [also

from Reckoning] was about the same relationship. At the time I was writing about

what I knew, and what I knew was myself. I found out I’m not that kind of writer. I think I’m better when I write about things that are not me.”

Perhaps that gift for stepping outside himself came in handy during the band’s