I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.

By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?"

The song "Sing for the Submarine" presents my dream world, which is way different from my waking world. It's set in the future and it's post-apocalyptic.

My iPod that was programmed by Peter Buck. It has 7,000 songs hand-picked for me by him.

We made part of the record in Miami, and I would go down to the beach, and not 20 feet from the water I see a fish that is at least seven feet long swimming close to the shore. I did not go back in the ocean the entire month.

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.

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.