Michael Stipe is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.

Just before Memorial Day in 2023, Stipe finally committed to barging ahead with his new material. He would spend a week at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, the legendary recording studio opened by Jimi Hendrix in 1970.

Stipe had booked the studio on the third floor, which opened onto a patio on the building’s roof. One evening, I found him outside in the thick of conversation with two younger musicians he’d just met. They happened to be Jack Antonoff, one of [Taylor] Swift’s producers and among the most prolific operators in pop music, and Matty Healy, the frontman of the 1975.

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