Michael Stipe, image via YouTube

Michael Stipe appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night. In a rare televised appearance, the iconic singer-songwriter and former R.E.M. frontman reflected on his progress on his long-awaited debut solo album, which he said will arrive by the end of the year, and performed a new song called “The Rest of Ever.”

Stipe’s freewheeling conversation with Colbert moved from his beard, to biopics, band relations and sea shanties. On the possibility of a film dramatizing his time with R.E.M., Stipe said he’d be keen to see Billie Eilish portray him, and responded more coolly to the idea of fellow Peach State counterculture representative David Cross. He spoke to his current relationship with his bandmates and looked back fondly on the quartet’s onstage reunion at the 2024 Songwriters Hall of Fame induction gala, then expressed his appreciation for Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy’s R.E.M. tribute act, which he joined for treatments of “These Days” and “The Great Beyond” at Brooklyn Steel in March.

Stipe has been working on his first solo album for years, and he got into some specifics with Colbert, including the note that several songs are influenced by electronic music, and one is about “the sound of a tree hearing itself for the first time.” “It’s this confusing situation,’ he said. “My friend recorded a tree in my backyard in Georgia and played it back to itself, and so it sounds like Daft Punk.” That song also supposedly includes misheard lyrics from the well-known shanty “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?” Despite these disparate interests, “The Rest of Ever” sounds fairly close to his tried and true style of roundabout introspection.

In a 2023 interview with The New York Times, Stipe explained that his aim to have each song on the album sound “very different”: “I have no management. I have no label. For the first time in my adult life, I don’t have a contract with anyone except myself. So I get to do whatever I want. Anyway, there will be a visual representation for each of the songs, and it should come together next year. I’m hoping to build slowly.”

After periodically addressing delays in the project, Stipe told The Times in March, “It’s been a struggle. That’s the main thing. I want it to be great, but I’ve got the pressure of having been in REM and it’s a high bar, because I want this to be as good as that, and that’s near impossible. So it’s fucking exciting but also terrifying, and I’m doing the music for the first time too, and I think I’m good at it but not great.”

Watch Stipe’s Late Show spot below.