Michael Stipe warned Thom Yorke of R.E.M.'s split by text

Michael Stipe sent Thom Yorke a text to warn him before R.E.M. announced on 21 September that they were breaking up after 31 years, Yorke tells David Fricke of Rolling Stone. It did not surprise him. I think it was kind of going one way for awhile. I just wanted to check that Michael was alright.¹

Fricke met him in a Manhattan hotel on 27 September, during Radiohead's New York week for The King of Limbs. Stipe spent much of that week with Yorke and came to Saturday Night Live. At the first Roseland show the next night, Yorke sat at an upright piano while the others changed instruments and sang a few words of R.E.M.'s 1987 hit “The One I Love” on his way into “Everything In Its Right Place”.

Colin Greenwood says Yorke was badly bitten by R.E.M. as a teenager. It was Michael's ability to be emotional and moving but oblique at the same time.¹ Yorke recalls first seeing them on the Green tour at Wembley Arena in June 1989, later than most of his friends; Stipe told him years after that he had a bad time that night and threw things around afterwards.

Yorke says he only really saw R.E.M. when Radiohead opened for them on the Monster tour in 1995, about two dozen shows in Europe and the US, with Stipe to watch every night. The two became friends after it. Stipe kept his distance on that tour, wholly there on stage and absent off it, which Yorke now understands. He was terrified at the microphone himself in those years, singing “Creep” and “My Iron Lung”, and Stipe's evasive mumbling between songs, never quite running away, taught him something. The things he was choosing not to do, not to be, were even more powerful than what he did.¹

What the band took from R.E.M., he says, was letting a show build mid-set without forcing it, something he had seen small bands manage in small rooms but never in a big one, and sees in Neil Young too. It meant not trying to add to it but just fucking stand there, waiting for the fire to start¹.