There was never a golden era of American radio as far as I can tell.

I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It's where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira's band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous.

When I get really hammered I take my clothes off. That's a sure sign. It's been a long time since the last time I did that. Probably a year.

We toured that record for a year, which turned out to be the culmination of ten years of being constantly on the road. We were sick to death of touring.

The artwork for the record is kind of an homage to that. It's a collage, which rhymes with homage, I just realized. It's an homage to this kind of almost like a teenager's idea of what the future might look like, if he were using a Xerox machine and cut-and-pasting it together. Which is exactly what we did to come up with the artwork.

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

For every great thing we did, there is a very public moment of falling on our faces. But everything that came through us as a band was a distinct vision of R.E.M.