A band who’s been around as long as R.E.M. will inevitable be asked, “When are you going to give it up?” Guitarist Peter Buck’s answer is maybe next year, maybe never.
Buck says it depends on the day: sometimes he thinks it’ll last another year, and sometimes he thinks he’ll be doing it when he’s 70.
“Right now I’m thinking it could last for a while. But I also sometimes wake up at 4 in the morning in a hotel and I can’t sleep and I haven’t seen my family in a couple of weeks and I just think, ‘Ya know I could go home right now and be OK,'” Buck told AP Radio.
He knows a lot of people grew up with them. He says if you went to college in the ’80s, “they’d give you your information booklet and an R.E.M. record.” He says a lot of people who are 35 to 40 years old now, R.E.M. was the soundtrack of their lives. And he finds that moving. He says when he was 21 and “as stupid and shallow as every other 21-year-old on earth,” he had to learn to do something meaningful to him, which in turn was meaningful to other people.
