Michael Stipe and Andrew Watt on what they've almost finished

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Set us as preferred It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Michael Stipe has taken 15 years to finish his debut solo album.That is indeed how long it’s been since the breakup of R.E.M., the sensitive yet venturesome alternative-rock band that Stipe led from the college-town wilds of Athens, Ga., to the pinnacle of global pop stardom in the MTV era.But the singer has kept busy with plenty else over the last decade and a half, including publishing several books of photos, producing an album by the electroclash group Fischerspooner and campaigning for Bernie Sanders during Sanders’ two presidential runs.“I just get distracted by everything,” he told the New York Times in 2023.Yet now, after years of work in various studios with various collaborators, Stipe is finally in the home stretch on his solo LP, he said this month in a joint video interview alongside one of his producers, Andrew Watt.

The singer, who’s 66, even has a release plan in place.(Read more about that below.)Stipe and Watt’s partnership grew out of a TV theme song, of all things: “I Played the Fool,” which the two wrote and recorded for “Rooster,” the Emmy-nominated HBO dramedy starring Steve Carell as a hacky novelist who lands a writer-in-residence gig at a small liberal-arts college.

“Rooster” was created by Bill Lawrence, whose many other shows include “Ted Lasso” and “Scrubs”; Watt — who’s become known as something of a classic-rock whisperer thanks to his work with the likes of Elton John, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones — composed the score for the series and is engaged to Lawrence’s daughter Charlotte.Dressed in a Cramps T-shirt, Watt, 35, Zoomed from his home in Los Angeles not long after he appeared with yet another client, Madonna, at the MTV Video Music Awards, where he portrayed Keith Haring in an all-s...