I don't find R.E.M. to be nihilistic. There is a constant undertone of joyous optimism. I'm not going to kill myself to Patti Smith or R.E.M.

I'm kind of quoting Thurston [Moore] and Kim [Gordon] in saying that about not being great with addicts, because they are the ones who said it to me.

You don't need to be talented. You don't even have to play the guitar to be a guitar player in a punk-rock band. So I, in a very naïve and teenage way, said, "That's it. I'm going to be in a band."

In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.

It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.

They always want me to play myself and that's a big snooze.

[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.