John Michael Stipe (; born January 4, 1960) is an American singer, songwriter and artist, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the alternative rock band R.E.M.
Around 1980, Stipe began attending the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he became involved in the local college rock and jangle pop scene. He formed R.E.M. after meeting his bandmates at the university and soon dropped out to pursue music with them. The band issued its debut single, "Radio Free Europe," and subsequently signed to I.R.S. Records, meeting wide acclaim and soon great commercial success.
Possessing a distinctive voice, Stipe has been noted for the "mumbling" style of his early career. Since the mid-1980s, Stipe has sung in "wailing, keening, arching vocal figures" that R.E.M. biographer David Buckley compared to Celtic folk artists and Muslim muezzin. He was in charge of R.E.M.'s visual aspect, often selecting album artwork and directing many of the band's music videos. Outside the music industry, he owns and runs two film production studios, C-00 and Single Cell Pictures.
As a member of R.E.M., Stipe was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. As a singer-songwriter, Stipe influenced a wide range of artists, including Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Bono of U2 has described his voice as "extraordinary", and Yorke told The Guardian that Stipe is his favorite lyricist, saying "I loved the way he would take an emotion and then take a step back from it and in doing so make it so much more powerful".
Stipe was born on January 4, 1960, in Decatur, Georgia, to Marianne and John Stipe. He was a military brat; his father was a serviceman in the United States Army, having served in Korea as a helicopter pilot. The elder Stipe's career resulted in frequent relocations for his family. His younger sister, Lynda Stipe, was born in 1962 and became the vocalist of Hetch Hetchy. Stipe and his family moved to various locales during his childhood, including West Germany, Texas, Illinois, and Alabama. In 1978, he graduated from high school in Collinsville, Illinois, in suburban St. Louis. His senior photo is pictured in the album art work of Eponymous. Stipe also worked at the local Waffle House. Previous generations of his family were Methodist ministers.
At age 14, Stipe was turned on to punk rock by an article in Creem magazine by Lisa Robinson on the CBGB scene. The article featured a photo of Patti Smith, whom Stipe came to idolize. He remembers buying her debut album, Horses, the day it came out. "Since then, I never looked back."
In the early 1980s, Stipe played in the group Boat Of with Tom Smith, who would later found the groups Peach of Immortality and To Live and Shave in L.A.. Carol Levy and Mike Green were also in the band.
While studying art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Stipe frequented the Wuxtry record shop, where he met store clerk Peter Buck in 1980. "He was a striking-looking guy and he also bought weird records, which not everyone in the store did," Buck recalled. The two became friends; they eventually decided to form a band and started writing music together, although at the time Stipe was also in a local group named Gangster. Buck and Stipe were soon joined by Bill Berry and Mike Mills, and named themselves R.E.M., a name Stipe selected at random from a dictionary. Stipe was the youngest member of the band.
All four members of R.E.M. dropped out of school in 1980 to focus on the new band. Stipe was the last to do so. The band issued its debut single, "Radio Free Europe," on Hib-Tone; it was a college radio success. The band signed to I.R.S. Records for the release of the Chronic Town EP one year later. In 1983, R.E.M. released its debut album, Murmur, which was acclaimed by critics. Stipe's vocals and lyrics received particular attention from listeners. Murmur went on to win the Rolling Stone Critics Poll Album of the Year over Michael Jackson's Thriller. Their second album, Reckoning, followed in 1984.
In 1985, R.E.M. traveled to England to record their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction, a difficult process that brought the band to the verge of a break up. After the album was released, relationships in the band remained tense. Gaining weight and acting eccentrically (such as by shaving his hair into a monk's tonsure), Stipe later identified himself as suffering from depression and exhaustion during this period, saying "I was well on my way to losing my mind."
They toured in Canada and throughout Europe that year; Stipe had bleached his hair blond during this time.
Bill Berry left R.E.M. in 1997, and the other members continued as a three-piece. R.E.M. disbanded amicably in 2011. Stipe confirmed in 2021 that they had no plans to reunite.
In September 1983, a few months after the release of R.E.M.'s debut album, Stipe participated in a low-budget, forty-five-minute Super-8 film called Just Like a Movie, shot in Athens by New York Rocker magazine photographer Laura Levine, who was a friend of the band. Those with acting roles in the film included Levine, Stipe, his sister Lynda, Matthew Sweet (who formed a short-lived duo, Community Trolls, with Michael Stipe), and R.E.M.'s Bill Berry. The film remains unreleased.
In the period between 1990 and 1992, Stipe was involved with the band Chickasaw Mudd Puppies. He co-produced and featured on their two albums: White Dirt (1990) and 8 Track Stomp (1991).
Stipe was friends with Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, who died in 1994. R.E.M. recorded the song "Let Me In" from the 1994 album Monster in tribute to Cobain. Stipe was chosen as the godfather of Cobain and Courtney Love's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. In 2023, Stipe officiated Frances's wedding to Riley Hawk.
Stipe was once very close to fellow alternative rock singer Natalie Merchant and has recorded a few songs with her, including one titled "Photograph," which appeared on a pro-choice benefit album titled Born to Choose, and they appeared live with Peter Gabriel singing Gabriel's single "Red Rain" at the 1996 VH1 Honors and a few other times.
Stipe and Tori Amos became friends in the mid-1990s and recorded a duet in 1994 called "It Might Hurt a Bit" for the Don Juan DeMarco motion picture soundtrack. Both Stipe and Amos decided not to release it.
In 1998, Stipe published a collection called Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith. In 2006, Stipe released an EP that comprised six different cover versions of Joseph Arthur's "In the Sun" for the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief fund. One version, recorded in a collaboration with Coldplay's Chris Martin, reached number one on the Canadian Singles Chart. Also in 2006, Stipe appeared on the song "Broken Promise" on the Placebo release Meds. Continuing his non-R.E.M. work in 2006, Stipe sang the song "L'Hôtel" on the tribute album to Serge Gainsbourg titled Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited and appeared on the song "Dancing on the Lip of a Volcano" on the New York Dolls album One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. He recorded a song with Miguel Bosé on the album Papito, "Lo que ves es lo que hay."