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Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.

I’m a 90’s kid and Losing My Religion is one of the first music videos I remember seeing. So I’ve always been an REM fan but I realized a while back that the only albums I knew were the ones released at the pinnacle of their popularity: Out of Time and Automatic for the People.

During the lockdown in 2020, my routine after breakfast would be to take Eamon, who was a little under two at the time, upstairs to our bedroom loft area while my wife worked. We’d hang out and play for a few hours and I would always have music playing on the stereo. I don’t remember exactly what led me to put on REM but more often than not I would start our morning play session with one of their early albums: Murmur, Reckoning, Fables, Document, or Green. These albums brought me a lot of happiness at a pretty tough time. Extremely fun and listenable but endlessly interesting. The perfect soundtrack to drawing and making puzzles with a two year old day after day. Or anytime, really. (I mean, starting your day with this is starting your day right.)

REM have been pretty quiet since they stopped making music and this profile of Stipe was a great look into what he’s been up to since, including, recently, working on a new record. Lots of fun cameos from Taylor Swift, Matty Healy, Phoebe Bridgers and The National. It’s refreshing to hear him talk candidly about struggling with the high expectations fans and himself have for his projects post-REM. One of my favorite parts of the piece is when, trying to make him feel better, Jack Antonoff tells Stipe he just needs a few good songs to make his new record stand on his own and Stipe vehemently disagrees: they all need to be good. It’s a telling moment and after listening to REM’s discography, you recognize this standard was there from the beginning.

DJ Python Essential Mix

This might be my favorite Essential Mix since Nicolas Jaar’s about ten years ago. So many highlights but right in the middle of the set he plays his song Angel, one of my favorite songs released in the past couple of years and it’s somehow even better sounding in the context of this mix.

The Adversary

I’m obviously biased being a fellow Newfoundlander but Michael Crummey is one of the great living writers. Newfoundland’s history has a lot of colorful characters but still, this is a book that makes you marvel at the wild and vivid worlds that writers are somehow capable of conjuring.

One thing that struck me while reading this book is how diminished Newfoundland’s place is as an international waypoint now compared to centuries ago. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a Bonavista resident at the turn of the 18th century had more direct contact with the outside world than their descendants do today.