PB: As R.E.M. grew from a little cult band into a bigger phenomenon, there must've been a point where your audience suddenly looked alien to you. Did you have to get past that struggle of kind of hating your audience?

MS: I wouldn't say I struggled with it, but I would say I kicked against it. There were points in the '80s where I did look out and see people who would kick my face in if they saw me on the sidewalk. And that's pretty disturbing. My reaction was to kick against that. Not so much through the music but through the performance, because that's really where I felt the distance. I feel like music is incredibly inclusive, so I never felt like these people weren't welcome. If anything, I wanted to throw the music in their faces. I didn't want the music to be exclusive to people who like what I like and think the way I think. That's incredibly limiting. Although sometimes it is personally frustrating to look out and see people like that in the audience, the music always felt to me like it rose above all that.

PB: Many people thought when Bill Berry left the band that that would be the end of R.E.M. Has it been harder than you thought it would be to move on without him?

MS: It was difficult. Now that chapter of our history is closed, but it wasn't an easy transition. We thought the band would break up if any one of us left. Yet the day he came and sat us down and said, "I've had enough. I wanna retire," the next thing out of his mouth was if he was going to break up the band up, he would stay and be miserable. None of us wanted that. He didn't want to be the guy who broke up R.E.M. He knew how much we loved doing what we do and yet he'd grown weary -- not so much of making music, but of everything else that's tied to it: the travel, the public eye, interviews, having to spend months away from home. It was a very difficult period for the three of us. The most difficult part was finding the chemistry we had as a four-piece as a three-piece. I feel confident we did.

PB: Was there ever a thought of not calling it R.E.M. as you moved on without Bill?

MS: I wanted to change the band's name every time we made a new record, because I don't like it. [Laughs] I mean I'm okay with it. It is what it is, but I wanted a name that didn't have periods in it and wasn't mispronounced in romance-language countries.

PB: How do they pronounce it?

MS: [Rolling his tongue] Remm-eh. [Laughs] The term R.E.M. is almost impossible to say in certain languages so it just became something else, which is fine. But it's very hard to work with periods, graphically.

PB: When will you know that it's time for R.E.M. to hang it up?

MS: I get this question a lot. I feel like we're pretty solid people, pretty grounded, and not at all fooled by either the good or bad stuff that's written about us. For us, it's always been about the music. We're going to know when we're repeating ourselves or falling back on some formula or punching the...what's it called?

PB: Punching the clock?

MS: Punching the clock, yeah. When that curiosity starts to wane, I feel like we'll be the first ones to realize that. I don't see that happening anytime soon. It feels to me like we're in a very creative period. But we'll know when we start to suck before anyone else. [Laughs]