Well, this is a band that stood up to record labels about producers before you even had an album, a band that had a distinct visual identity from the beginning, a band with the instinct to split all the songwriting credits equally.
You could call it the Peter Buck school of how not to fuck up and fuck over your closest friends.
And lots of bands learned from that model over the last three decades. But most bands, like most athletes, stick around too long. Was that R.E.M.’s final lesson: Let us show you how to bow out gracefully?
No one’s ever done it before, as far as we know. It’s not a lesson, necessarily. I do have my professorial side, and I think you know that. I shy away from it because I hear myself talking and I’m just like, “You’re a fucking blowhard, shut up.” And I hope you print that because someone needs to hear that coming from me. As much as I’m crazily sentimental – and I pull away from that as much as I can, but my part in what we did is that inherent contradiction that is such a part of humanity. I think consciously or unconsciously, people hear and feel that in my voice and in the lyric. I think I know what this is about, but it doesn’t matter what he’s thinking because I can make it my own. That’s all there and that works. And then there’s the inherent contradiction within the band and within each of us and what we want. It all made for a pretty amazing package, I think, for a long fucking time. And we did go out on our own terms. That means the world to us.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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