Michael Stipe, the soulful vocalist, lyricist, poet, photographer, and visual artist from Athens, Georgia woefully echoes the dark and melancholic with his unique, once-in-a-generation voice and a stage presence that recalls a Southern preacher summoning distant ghosts. He has said that generations of men in his family were Methodist ministers and that he comes from a place of faith. REM, the band he founded with fellow students at the University Of Georgia, which released its debut album in 1981, inspired a generation of bands after them: The Smiths, Nirvana, Pixies, The Cranberries, and countless others. For three decades, the band cemented itself as one of the most important and foundational fulcrums of alternative music. Their song “Losing My Religion,” an unlikely smash hit from the band’s 1991 album Out Of Time, is a haunting, prophetic, and abstract ballad of fractured spirituality, existential questioning, and yearning that could very well be a soundtrack to our present reality. In September 2022, the music video for “Losing My Religion,” which was directed by Tarsem Singh, reached the rare milestone of one billion views on YouTube. In the following interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stipe discusses his disparate art-making practices, alternative truths, and art as the highest form of hope.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I have some questions about the past, but I think we should start with the extreme present. You're working a lot, as always, and you're editing images. The last time we spoke you were involved with the curation of some shows and also with your own visual art practice. So, I'd love to hear more about what you're working on now.

MICHAEL STIPE Right now, it feels like there's this upsurge in interest in magazines. I'm doing all this work for different magazines, like this conversation. And it's exciting to me. I was editing images for a collection of nudes—photos that I took some years back, but have never been seen before. Some were in the books that I've done with Damiani. I've done three books now with Damiani out of Bologna, and I'm working on a fourth book. I'm also working on another book with a different publisher, which is a collection of lyrics. And I'm doing that with Patti Smith. Then I'm working on my first solo album, which hopefully will be out by September of 2023, and a solo show at ICA Milan—also in fall of 2023. And that will be a lot of photographic works, some sculpture pieces, and some audio/visual stuff, not unlike what you saw at the Serpentine so long ago.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Can you tell me about these books? Helen Levitt once told me that when a photographer makes a book, it's often as important as an exhibition. And that's not only true for photographers, it's also true for visual artists. The artist book is such an important medium. We just lost Lawrence Weiner, one of the great masters of artist books, who had done hundreds of them. And you've given a lot of time to these artists' books with Damiani. Can you tell me about these three different volumes?

MICHAEL STIPE Sure. I'd love to. But first I have to ask, you spoke with Helen Levitt?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I had a conversation with Helen Levitt when she was in her late eighties. In her house, in New York, the heating wasn't so great, it was a bit chilly. And she had layouts of books around. And then there was a lamp in the middle of the table—quite a big lamp. And that was the warmest place, because the lamp emanated some warmth. And her cat sat underneath the lamp because the cat was also freezing. And so, it was actually a trialogue between her, myself and the cat.

MICHAEL STIPE Incredible. I tried with two friends in 1989 to make a documentary film on the life of Helen Levitt and the work that she produced as an artist. I think she's extraordinary. But we never succeeded in making the documentary. We had to go through a woman who was acting as her agent, but this woman had severe allergies to everything. So, we were not allowed to wash our bodies with soap, or wear deodorant, or use shampoo, or smoke within three days of seeing this woman. And we never got past her to Helen. So, I'm thrilled that you did. As a fan of her work, I purchased several of her images in the 1980s and I still have them. I still have the box that she wrote in her beautiful script: fragile, please do not bend. I have to say, I agree with Helen Levitt in terms of images done for books. At this point in my early sixties, I'm realizing that books are quite permanent, and they'll get lost or forgotten, and then they'll get found again many generations, or decades later. I love the photo books that I've worked on for that reason, because I think they can be either seen or not seen right now. One of my most recent purchases that I've been reading is this hysterically funny memoir, a biography of John Hurt, the actor. I bought it on eBay. It's signed to Michael, with my very best wishes, John Hurt. Well, I bought it on eBay and it was some other Michael that he signed this book to, but it's quite interesting. And then I have this book by the photographer Dino Pedriali—images of [Pier Paolo] Pasolini.

“We're at battle with ourselves to try and establish what is truth and what is alternative versions of truth…” - Michael Stipe

HANS ULRICH OBRIST So, you also collect books?

MICHAEL STIPE I love books. But my point is that these books were put out sometime in the 1970s, and they'd been forgotten on a shelf somewhere for all that time. And as I developed an interest in Pasolini, my boyfriend Thomas [Dozol] is reading a book of Pasolini’s as he travels from Berlin to New York, completely separate from my having collected these books by Dino Pedriali. As an artist, I feel like my job really is to address the present moment and try to be as instinctual and true to myself in that moment, because I feel like that always resonates. Even if it's not completely obvious, there's always an audience for work that is instinctual and is done about the present moment. It's our job to push ideas forward and to push towards a more expansive, progressive future. To answer your question about the three books with Damiani—Volume One was the first one that I did, with Jonathan Berger, the artist and curator. And the second one that I did with Douglas Coupland, [Our Interference Times: A Visual Record], is about the strange moment that we are in now between analog and digital, and how generationally you can sit down with a 15-year-old or a 25-year-old and have a completely different perspective on what imagery is and what it means, and the power of imagery based on how they've received their information digitally versus how we received our information. Our generation received it first in analog. Now, there’s a renewed interest in younger generations working with analog methods like cameras with film, which I've gone back to. Having been almost exclusively digital for a while, I've now gone back to [Kodak] Tri-X, which I just love shooting with.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST It's interesting about the analog—the fact that our generation kind of lived in this inbetween space because we had an analog childhood and then at a certain point in the ‘90s, the digital arrived. I remember when I visited you in your apartment in New York, maybe ten years ago, when we started to work on a Serpentine performance, you showed me some sculptures of analog media, like audio cassettes. It would be great to hear a little more about your sculpture.

MICHAEL STIPE I mean, those felt necessary at the time. But now, it's interesting that there's a renewed interest in vinyl for listening to records. There's a renewed interest in cassettes for listening to music. There's a renewed interest in all these cameras that I thought were just moving into the past. They became relics, which is what I called those bronze pieces. I love picking up a camera that looks like it's made of plastic, and it's bronze, and it weighs five pounds, and it's quite fun to watch people's reaction when they pick up one of those pieces. I've certainly moved on from there, though. That was a great long time ago. I think I did those pieces in 2008. But the book does address the cultural and generational shift that's occurred with the advent of digital technology and how impactful that's been on our lives. We now see the pathetic or rather sad impact of social media on politics and on political movements. And now, we're at battle with ourselves to try and establish what is truth and what is alternative versions of truth, and what is an alternative version of an alternative version of truth, and this is leading into territory that you and Doug [Coupland] certainly cover a lot in your work, which is more looking into the future to wonder where we're going to be. With the advent of Deepfake and AI, we have to be quite careful about where it's all headed and establish grounded attitudes towards what is real and what is not real, but also obviously grounded attitudes about what is the importance of privacy and how that impacts our daily lives.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST The book addresses that big theme?

MICHAEL STIPE Mostly it's visual. It's about how if you move into a digital image, it eventually looks like a molecular photograph of nature, and how as we get further away from analog through digital technology we become perhaps a little more understanding of the magnificence of nature, and we maybe have a greater calling towards preserving our place here on this beautiful planet, and acknowledging the impact that we've had through all these advancements that we've made. Some of which are absolutely brilliant. But moving forward with true stewardship, not only towards ourselves, but towards other species and the concerns that have arisen with our dominance over the past couple hundred years.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST It’s interesting because I remember about fifteen years ago, when we saw these sculptures of yours and there were the first exhibitions, and then you started working on the books—you didn’t stop making performances. People thought that you transitioned from music into arts, but looking at your trajectory, that's far from the truth. The truth is that you've always had these parallel realities. There is music, but there is also poetry to the lyrics. There is visual arts. There is photography, and of course performance.

MICHAEL STIPE Performance is profoundly important, because it’s always what I did.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Your practice is very fluid. It incorporates poetry, music, performance, architecture. They are parallel realities.

MICHAEL STIPE Yes. I agree entirely. I'm happy that this century has provided us with a language and an understanding of stepping away from that sandboxing, where you do one thing and that's all that you should do. And rather, acknowledging that there's a Venn diagram. There are areas that overlap, particularly within the creative community now. People are able to establish their work in more than one medium. Patti Smith is an excellent example of that as well. The work that she's done as a writer in the past decade has added to the understanding of her as a polyglot—and added to the work that she did as a singer, songwriter, musician, and performer. And there's a younger generation of people that don't feel constrained by these same ideas; that if you're an actor, that's all that you can be. If you're a musician, that's all that you can be. If you're a painter, you should absolutely not try sculpture or poetry. Well, I think that's hooey.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And of course, Patti Smith has to do with an early epiphany of yours because there’s a rumor that you were fourteen when you saw an article in Cream magazine by Lisa Robinson on the CBGB scene. There was a photo of Patti Smith and that somehow was a trigger. It’s interesting because I spoke to Kazuyo Sejima and I asked, “Why did you become an architect?” And she said, “You know, when I was a teenager, I opened a magazine in my parents' house and there was a photo of Sky House by Kiyonori Kikutake and this little black/white photo opened everything.” It seems like that photo of Patti Smith, who later became a friend and colleague, has been really liberating for you. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MICHAEL STIPE It's really wild to count her among my closest friends and to be able to observe the work that she does as an artist from a distance as a fan, but also from really up close and to see how dedicated she is to her work. As a friend, she'll ghost me for two weeks at a time and I'll finally reach out to her, like, are you okay? Is everything right? It turns out she's just been off writing and working. Phone calls and texts and communication with friends and family fall to the wayside. She has this sense of priority to her work that I find extremely invigorating and thrilling—it pushes me to embrace the moment when I am working, to step away from the phone to step away from this feeling that I have to be in constant contact with people all the time. I mean, I'm doing this conversation with you partly because I just haven't seen you in so long and I wanted to say hi, but I'm in the middle of writing a series of songs—I've got eight finished, I'm working on another ten of those, and about six are in very good shape. And so, I've been in the studio all week, working predominantly with synthesizers, and working with a live drummer, which is brand new for me since my former band disbanded. It's my first solo record, and I just had to step away from what turned into about five years because it was so all-encompassing. In the most beautiful way, it steals every breath that I had for the better part of my adult life. I needed to take a really long break away from music in order to either approach it again or to find other mediums that I wanted to explore. As it turns out, because of the 21st century, with the understanding that a lyricist can do all these other things, I feel free and open to exploring this publicly. It's stuff that I would've been doing privately anyway, but now there's this interest in books and how permanent books are compared to performance, compared to other ways that I've expressed myself in the past. I'm really excited about my books being stuck on a shelf somewhere and discovered fifteen years from now by someone who doesn't even know that I once sang with a band, or that I have a voice outside of photography, or portraiture.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And there is one book that’s missing—a book of earlier poems and lyrics, that doesn't exist yet. No?

MICHAEL STIPE That's the book that I'm working on with Patti. It was her idea and she really pushed me to put out a classic volume of poetry in the form of lyrics.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And what are the new lyrics about?

MICHAEL STIPE I'm right in the middle of it, so it's hard to talk about, but there's a very 21st-century duality. The themes that I'm addressing are extremely layered and nuanced. There seem to be threads running through the songs not only thematically, but there are these characters I’ve written that keep appearing at different times in their lives. There are a few examples of new work online, a song called "Your Capricious Soul" and there's a song called "Drive To The Ocean" that you can find on all the streaming platforms. I released them as they came out because I didn't want to feel like I was holding material for a big solo album splash. I just felt more comfortable putting it out into the world and letting it be what it is right now.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And the theme, of course, of the magazine is “Losing My Religion.” It will be an exploration of changing belief systems in the age of information and disinformation, secularization, conspiracy theory. You already talked about the information age in relation to your books, and I suppose those are themes that appear in the new lyrics.

MICHAEL STIPE I'm quite suspicious of social media. I was on it for a while and I was having fun with it. But then, I felt violated by it, truthfully. I felt like this was not the truest or best way for me to establish communication with, not only people that are in my life, but also with some spoken or unspoken audience that's out there watching or listening. This is something that we really do have to address in a big way: the impact that this has on how we are able to, or not able to, communicate with each other as individuals, as people, and to question these very important issues of privacy and truth. What is truth? You know, Wolfgang Tillmans did this book called What Is Different?, which addressed the idea of people that have believed something, and then when that thing is proven to be false, rather than acknowledging that they've been tricked, they double down. It’s called the Backfire Effect. So, what is truth, and what is alternative truth? Another one of my main sources is a podcast that I strongly recommend called Conspirituality. It's these guys that talk about exactly these topics in a way that I find very interesting. I follow them quite routinely. One of the last books that I thoroughly enjoyed was a recommendation from that podcast by an author named Benjamin Teitelbaum called War For Eternity. It's quite prescient to the moment that we're in, because one of the main characters in the book is Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher whose daughter was just murdered in a car bomb in Moscow.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Who is a nationalist philosopher.

MICHAEL STIPE Yes, but he's also a follower of a spiritual belief called Traditionalism, and he shares that belief system with other people, such as Steve Bannon and Olavo de Carvalho, who died this past February in Virginia, but was an advisor to Bolsonaro in Brazil. So, it's all these places where these somewhat despotic or protofascist leaders are espousing these ideas and putting them into policy, and behind them are these people that have this shared spiritual belief system.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST This issue is connected to these current discussions. You already addressed information, and disinformation, but it's also an homage to the extraordinary hit single of yours and REM, “Losing My Religion.” And it connects to what we just said about your lyrics being great poetry, which are about very existential torment. As far as I understood from what I read is that the title comes from a Southern expression that refers to being so desperate and at the end of your rope that you lose faith. Can you talk about the moment, or the epiphany for this song?

MICHAEL STIPE I don't remember the moment of titling the song, “Losing My Religion.” The lyrics came out of automatic writing. The actual Southern phrase that I drew from is not losing, it's lost. I lost my religion. I almost lost my religion. You would say, “The rain was so intense I almost lost my religion.” Or, “We were late to the party and she kept yelling in the car—I almost lost my religion.” You would say it in this very casual way. But in the song, it becomes much more than that. It turned out to be the biggest hit that my band had at the time—other songs eclipsed it later, but that was and remains one of our best known songs. The book I was just talking about with these followers of Traditionalism is, in a way, a 21st-century version of a kind of made up religion that is inspired by Hinduism, but has been pieced together. And these quite significant characters in our history as we are living it in the present moment, they each have their own version of it, and they don't even necessarily agree. In one case, you know, Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon are working against each other in terms of China and what China means to the Soviet Union or what China means to the Western world. And so, it reminds me of another song I wrote called “Oh My Heart.” And the opening line is the kids have a new take on faith. Pick up the pieces and get carried away. It addresses this idea that in our generation, Hans Ulrich, people in the 1960s and ‘70s started to question organized religion and the importance it had in our lives. Not just politically, but spiritually and emotionally how manipulated we were by our belief systems. In questioning these organized religions, we all started piecing together from different belief systems. So it was like, here's this new thing called transcendental meditation, or here's an understanding of Hinduism that we didn't have before through the advent of yoga, and the Beatles going to hang out with the Maharishi, or the concert for Bangladesh. All these different understandings coming at us and people pulling from Judaism, from Buddhism, from Islam, from Christianity, from Catholicism, from Atheism, pulling together and creating each of us, a church of ourselves, a belief that what's right for Michael is the church of Michael. And I'm gonna alter and shift these beliefs and these ideas as they fit what I need them to be. And you could say the same for the church of Hans Ulrich. There may be a lot of overlap in your belief system with my belief system, the things that we agree or disagree about, but there might be places where mine just goes flying off into outer space with let's say an interest in Vedic astrology. And yours might go flying off in a different direction with an interest in a messenger RNA technology brought about by fever dreams, let's say. So that’s something that the 21st century has afforded us. And it's interesting to me—this phrase “Losing My Religion” is something that can be taken in many, many different ways. And it's a nice song—it's a song about kind of an obsessive, yearning love—but as a phrase it moves into culture in a way that it has a much broader and more nuanced meaning.

“I'm the glass half full guy, I always will be, even with my darkest writing, my darkest songs, I try to infuse a bit of hope and optimism into them.” - Michael Stipe

HANS ULRICH OBRIST It’s one of my favorite songs. Also, what happens when religion is gone and there are no gods to turn to? It brings me to the question of art being a new religion—maybe not a new religion, but art as the highest form of hope, as Gerhard Richter said.

MICHAEL STIPE Oh, I would not be in disagreement with that. You know, it's a little bit of church of Michael for me to say this, but I do believe that artists at their best are providing new ways to look at who we are in the moment in order to present a more hopeful, more progressive or optimistic future, to move forward as humans with a greater understanding of the complexity of our emotional and our spiritual lives, and allowing ourselves as artists to be vulnerable, to fall on our face publicly, to put together an entire body of work that may be actual shit. And then to say, “Well, what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.” I think with live performance, certainly, and I know this firsthand, every night wasn't brilliant, and there were nights when people recognized that. But there was an understanding that these are humans trying to do their very best work, and we have to acknowledge and understand the positive things that they've done and say, “Well, they had an off night, maybe it wasn't as great as it could have been.”

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Another thing, which has to do with this idea of collapse is the extinction crisis. MIT published a report in the ‘70s saying that by the mid-21st century, with the extraction of resources, mining, and environmental disasters, that we are on track for this collapse of civilization. And now predictions are that this could even be even earlier than 2040 as predicted, but as soon as 2030. There are more wars and famines. So, that of course also raises the question, not only of art being hope, but also of the agency we have in finding solutions. Can you talk a little bit about this?

MICHAEL STIPE For me, it started at a very young age. I bought my first toys as a seven-year-old by collecting bottles and newspapers, and recycling them. But I had a very early class at the age of thirteen or fourteen in environmental science. It was a year-long class and I believed quite naively from that class that my generation would be the one that would bring about alternative energy. That we would cure the problems of air pollution, of industrial pollution, of landfills. Climate change was not something that was spoken about in 1973 or ‘74, but everything that was written then was leading towards this ultimate collapse of our relationship with our planet, with the world. The idea that our grandparents’ generation had, about the world’s resources being endless, and not finite, we now understand to be inaccurate. Something that art can provide, hopefully, is optimism. I'm the glass half full guy, I always will be, even with my darkest writing, my darkest songs, I try to infuse a bit of hope and optimism into them, or a bit of an epiphany into the character so that even if they are in this very dark place, they're coming through it into something else. We didn’t recognize growing up, the idea that by the mid-21st century, and now possibly sooner with this ecological disaster upon us, this would have such an impact on young people. They’re bombarded with this message from social media, television, their parents, school teachers, policymakers that it's hopeless. And this hopelessness is emotionally and spiritually infused into these younger generations. Again, I’m quite hopeful, but I see the exact opposite of that. I feel like culturally, there is this immense problem of hopelessness. But I also see—and I'm speaking of my goddaughters here, so this is anecdotal—people that are teenagers now, or in their early twenties, and are turning this on its head and saying, “This is our time to make vast change, to implement the knowledge that we have available to us, and push it towards something that is hopeful, and not just a collapsing dystopian universe.”

HANS ULRICH OBRIST In terms of positive contributions that actually can be done, you did the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief fund, covering Joseph Arthur's “In The Sun.” Can you talk a little bit about this?

MICHAEL STIPE My response to Katrina was visceral because I had worked in New Orleans and I felt obligated to that city. The song that I quoted earlier about the kids having a new take on faith is a song written about Katrina. It's a character that has survived the storm, and is now being bussed off to some other place, and he has no idea where he's going. There's two songs—one called “Houston,” and that was immediately after Katrina. And then, there's another song called, “Oh, My Heart.” Each of these are the same character, in the first song, leaving New Orleans as a destroyed flooded city. And in the second song, returning to New Orleans to help bring it back to the majesty of a city, we raised over a million dollars for Katrina hurricane relief. Justin Timberlake helped with the record. All these people stepped forward and donated their time and energy towards providing something that would allow for a little bit of relief for the people that lived there and the people that were displaced. And displacement is another part of what we're looking at—we're going to have environmental refugees and political refugees for the remainder of our lives. This is something that we need to address immediately because of these larger ideas of what is a nation, what is a border? What is our obligation? Where is nationalism after the perversion of that, that we found in the 20th century during World War II? What is nationalism and what is the importance of nation states and borders? And a greater understanding, that might be extremely church of Michael, but a greater understanding of humanity and the idea of Gaia, the idea of Earth as its own entity, and our relationship to it.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I met James Lovelock and did long interviews with him about his ideas on Gaia. One of the things we can concretely do about climate change is eat less meat. So, you've also opened a vegetarian restaurant in Athens, Georgia—is that still open?

MICHAEL STIPE It is ongoing, but I didn't open it. I'm the landlord of the building that the restaurant is in. I was never involved beyond that. So, that's been a misunderstanding or rumor for decades. I decided very early on as a young man that I didn't want to eat meat and I stopped for twenty years. And then, I started again, and stopped again. But it’s a very minor example of something that we can do individually. There are greater understandings to address and questions to be thrown into the conversation in terms of where we are with climate refugees and with climate change, and all the other problems we are facing now. Brian Eno also started the organization Earth Percent which is basically a tithing for people who work in the music industry, to offer a percentage of the money that they are able to bring in towards addressing climate change.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Somebody who is in the younger generation of music and has been very active in environmentalism is the amazing Mykki Blanco. And you worked on a new track with Mykki for his album. Can you tell me about that?

MICHAEL STIPE We've known each other for a while and he just sent me a text and said, “I'm doing a new record. I've got a song, I hear your voice on it. What do you say?” And I said, “send me the song. Let me see what I think about it.” And I loved the song—it’s called “Family Ties.” I recorded my voice and did some footage for a music video and they mixed it in. It's a beautiful song and a beautiful record. And Mykki is a beautiful, beautiful performer. The album and song is available online.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I forgot to ask you before, do you remember the day when you decided that REM would be called REM and what prompted that name?

MICHAEL STIPE Yes, it’s funny. We needed to have a name. So, we opened a dictionary, stayed up all night and wrote names with chalk on the wall of the apartment we were renting at the time. There were a lot of joke names that were silly and stupid, but the name REM I found in the dictionary, which stands for ‘rapid eye movement.’ We decided to take the name and make it stand for nothing. And I hadn't really written a proper song at the age of twenty when we chose that name. But a year and a half later, I had started writing proper songs. I found my voice as a writer and as a lyricist. Looking back, it's interesting to me that a lot of the inspiration that I have comes from this quasi-somnambulant dream state. And that's where these lyrics and these ideas are coming from. So, REM was quite appropriate as a name.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST We know a lot about architects' unrealized projects because architects enter into competitions, and they publish them, which helps with later making them seem perfectly realizable. But we know almost nothing about visual artists, musicians, composers, poets, and filmmakers’ unrealized projects. It's interesting to talk about unrealized projects, not in order to keep them unrealized, but to actually create awareness and maybe find ways to get them realized. I was curious if you could tell me about one, or two, or three of your favorite unrealized projects.

MICHAEL STIPE Speaking as a 62-year-old, and realizing that my time on Earth is limited, and the ideas that I have just keep compounding, I have to really focus on what's significant enough for me with the time I've got remaining and focus on that. I want to be happy in the work that I'm doing. I want to feel satisfied and fulfilled on a personal level, but I also wanna feel like I'm leaving something behind. Not only am I addressing something in the moment, which is crucial to the artist, but I'm also leaving something behind that's significant and important. And that resonates past the moment of August of 2022. So unrealized projects—about ten or twelve years ago, I approached a couple of people with the idea of creating a marble bust. The three people that I will name are a friend of mine named John, who just has a very beautiful face, a very long nose, a very prominent brow, and large ears that stick out; Amanda Lepore; and the London-based chef, Margo Henderson—she and her husband have several restaurants. I just think she's one of the most extraordinarily beautiful women on Earth. Marc Quinn did some pretty significant busts, but I don't know of anyone who has really carried it into the 21st century. I felt someone needed to do that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Beautiful. And then, there are also some of your films. I remember you once told me that just after launching the debut album of REM, you worked on a low-budget, Super 8 film, and that's a realized, unrealized project. It was shot in Athens, Georgia but it's actually never been released. Is that true?

MICHAEL STIPE I’m in my studio right now in Athens, Georgia and there are several boxes of undeveloped Super 8 film that I shot in the 1980s that had thematic thread running through them. The project was called Self-Timer. And then, of course, there's the project that I mentioned at the very top of our conversation—the documentary film about the work and life of Helen Levitt.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And that’s an amazing coincidence that we started with that. There is also an unrealized album with Kurt Cobain. I couldn't find much information online, but I know that you wanted to lure him away from his home to help him. And there was no more time, because he passed away. You did a tribute to him on the album Monster, but before that, when he was still alive, you wanted to do an album together.

MICHAEL STIPE The word lure is exactly perfect. I created a project to try to get him out of the frame of mind that he was in. He was in a very dark place and ultimately, he didn't survive that dark place. The plan was to geographically take him out of that house and put him in a recording studio with a project in mind. And I was dangling myself and the idea of a collaboration as the carrot, but it didn't work. I sent plane tickets. I sent a driver to pick him up. The driver sat outside the house for hours. Kurt never came to the door. And after his death, the plane tickets were thumbtacked to the wall in the bedroom. I'd like to think that he considered the possibility. I had turned to Jem Cohen, the astonishing film director out of Brooklyn, and he wrote a letter to Kurt describing a film project and saying that his voice and his working with me would be the perfect collaboration. But it was really something that I just made up to try to lure him out of a dark place.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I just reread Kurt Cobain's diaries. They're beautiful. I was wondering if you have diaries?

MICHAEL STIPE I don't, no. My diaries are photographs. I never liked my handwriting, so I try not to write anything down. I find it very distracting and embarrassing, and it’s the same with my signature, but as a public figure I'm expected to sign things. I've never kept a diary. Do you keep a diary? I would think that your conversations really are a brilliant testament of what you do.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST My diary is thousands of hours of conversations with artists, musicians, poets, architects. It’s a daily practice.

MICHAEL STIPE I don't know that anyone has matched the number of insanely talented people who you've sat down and had brilliant conversations with. It is, in its own right, a lost art. And so, thank you for that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST No, thank you for an amazing interview. It would have never happened without our friend Jonas Mekas. When I was in my early twenties, I was at a cafe in Paris and I told him what I was doing, that I wanted to document the ideas and lives of artists and architects. He always had his Super 8 camera, and he told me, “You are going to regret it one day, if you don't record all these conversations.” So, Jonas really pushed me to do it.

MICHAEL STIPE Wow. Of course it would be Jonas who did that. And I found in the Do It book, his instruction is one of the simplest: Do it, move your finger up and down for one minute every morning. That's Jonas. God bless him.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And last, but not least. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this beautiful little book with advice to a young poet. Obviously a lot of young artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers will read our interview and want to listen to you. So I’m wondering, what would be your advice to them? What's your advice to a young artist, filmmaker, musician?

MICHAEL STIPE Trust your voice, trust your instinct, allow yourself the space to hear what your instinct is telling you and make sure to write it down. Get it down on video, put it down on your phone—however you have to get it down. And then trust that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I think that could not be a more beautiful conclusion. Thank you so much.

MICHAEL STIPE Thank you Hans Ulrich, have a wonderful sleep tonight.