Michael Stipe appeared on Jane Pratt’s Friday night Sirius Satellite Radio show and discussed his love of the band Interpol, a songwriting trick from Bono and the brilliance of Sean Penn's "Into the Wild."
Most importantly, there are 14 songs recorded for the next R.E.M. album, which might be released in March.
"It’s been a really tough 10 years for us," Stipe told Pratt. "We at times, we’re not communicating on the level that we should have been and we were trying to keep a real brave face publicly, and kind of hold through it, but I have to say I think we finally found a place of communication. We’re talking to each other, we’ve written a bunch of great songs, we’ve recorded 14, I’ve written 14,  I’ve got another four songs to present to the guys next week when we go back in the studio and one of those is really going to surprise them.  I can’t wait to see them."
Stipe, who will head to Europe for an October press tour supporting the band's live DVD, credits Bono with showing him to use voice memo on the phone. "If you have a melody idea or a lyric idea, a melody idea really, you can go to voice memo and you can just sing into your phone. And then later you can transfer it to whatever you need to, or remember the melody like that. So that helps out a lot."
Stipe was in New York hoping to catch Interpol's performance at Madison square Garden. 
Earlier int he week he had seen
"Into the Wild," which Penn wrote and directed.
"I was completely blown away by this film. It’s one of the heaviest. ... This film has not left me in a week, I am still thinking about it.  I wake up and think of the different levels of what was going on in this movie and the story itself, which is pretty arresting, but there’s all this other stuff. It’s a masterful film and I would recommend it to anyone."

For anyone who is unaware, all music journalists conspire with each other to not only ask the same questions of each recording artist, but ask them in the same order. It has been a big secret for years, but nobody could pull the wool over the eyes of Kid Rock. Not even Entertainment Weekly's Chris Willman, one of the best rock scribes going. As part of a collection of rambling tirades, Willman was subjected to this swell theory from Mr. Bob Ritchie, who may or may not be "Rock and Roll Jesus":

It's funny. Every interview I do, I can tell you what the people are gonna say. They're gonna talk about the record; about five questions down, they're gonna ask something silly; about eight questions down, they're gonna try to ask me about Pamela. It's so f---in' cookie cutter, it's almost hilarious. Because everyone is supposed to be so creative and have these innovative magazines and want to be great writers and do things in their own way, yet they're all the same — on down the line, every single one of 'em. And I know the editors tell 'em all to do it. [Breaking into an imitation of a journalist.] ''I didn't come up with the questions, dude. I gotta ask you about it, though.'' Do you really? Well, that's fun. You sound like a disc jockey nowadays: ''I don't play what I want, I'm told what to do.'' It doesn't sound like something you go to school for and be creative. Anyway, go ahead.