Michael Stipe

John Michael Stipe (born January 4, 1960) is an American singer, songwriter and artist, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of alternative rock band R.E.M.

Possessing a distinctive voice, Stipe has been noted for the "mumbling" style of his early career.

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 whose 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.

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.”

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.

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 LA.

Also in Boat Of were Carol Levy and Mike Green.

While attending 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.

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".