At the private airport in Seattle where Michael Stipe flew in during the final sessions for R.E.M.'s album New Adventures in Hi-fi, there was one other plane on the tarmac. A huge plane. After it landed, all these cars with flashing lights drove around it on the tarmac. What the fuck is going on? Then the plane slowly turned, and he could read the side: "Dole for President 1996." So Michael Stipe ran out onto the tarmac. Mooned him.

"I pulled my pants down. Twice. A security guard wasn't quite sure what was going on, and he turned his light on me, so I ran out again and did it twice. They put a spotlight on me." You think Bob Dole saw your cheeks? "I certainly hope not. He doesn't deserve it."Most of the latest R.E.M. songs were written last year on tour, following a plan that was hatched during the promotional interviews for Monster. They would talk to journalists, two by two: Berry & Buck, Mills & Stipe. The first pair began to tell interviewers that they were going to record the next RE.M. recorded live on the road, in the manner of Neil Young's Time Fades Away. Half an hour later, the same interviewers would ask Mike and Michael about it. "And then they'd say to us," Peter Buck remembers, ' What's all this shit about us doing some kind of live record?' " But the plan was forged, then exercised with some discipline. On tour, R.E.M. would work through new songs onstage for an hour or so every single concert afternoon, by way of a sound check, while a tape recorder whirled. "The sound checks got really fun," Buck recalls. "The crew would bring their dinner in and sit down and listen." Sometimes, when Stipe didn't have any lyrics, he would go out into the empty auditorium and dance along.

Before they started, Michael Stipe felt — as he always feels when it comes to gathering up and starting over — that he could never write another lyric again. But then the words "just came hurtling out." His topics chose themselves, but he recognized them. "It was, Oh, well, more dark, sad songs about death and anxiety," he says. "I was kind of chuckling: 'I can't possibly write another one of those.' But you can't really put reins on something like that." He noticed that their flavor was, if anything, closest to RE.M.'s first album, Murmur: "Again, it's passage. It's distance and passage and moving from one place and going to another, and never quite being there, and how close are you and how close do you want to be, and how far away are you and how far away do you want to be, and how does that affect you. Kinda."

Then there's something else. Maybe. "The only consistent theme on this record," declares Mike Mills, "is alien abduction. It's in several songs. You just have to look for it. That's our mystery theme for this record." Michael Stipe says this is, in some strange way, true. He points to relevant passages in "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" and "Electrolite." (I ask him whether he believes in alien abduction. "Do I believe in it? Well, to say yes would make me" — he is silent for a few seconds — "yeah, I do.")

The first lyric Michael Stipe came up with was for "Departure," which he wrote — as the song itself suggests — following a long flight from Singapore to San Sebastian, Spain. R.E.M. were flying over the ocean, the planes lights out, and everyone around him was asleep, just these lumps of polyester blankets. "It was sweet, like a nursery or something." He was watching an immense thunderstorm down below the plane on the left side. This bright orange storm over the sea one of the most beautiful things he'd ever seen in his life. "And," he says, "it was all mine."

When he arrived in San Sebastian, after he checked in, he wrote all the words down on Spanish hotel stationery. "And if you think I'm going to tell you what I think it's about," he says, "you're wrong."

I ask him about one image I thought I had heard in the song: "a hailstone brought you back to me."

Is that — a hailstone — an airplane?

[Looking perplexed] Hailstorm. It's a hailstorm. It's when hail comes down. Is that what you call it?

[Nodding] Sorry. I was being a shade too clever.

Oh, you thought it was hellstorm?

No, not that clever. I thought it was hailstone. As a metaphor for an airplane covered in ice.

No. That's good. But it's hailstorm. [Pauses] I think.

[Apologetically] Oh, well sorry. Slap me.

[Quietly] Let's don't and say we did. (A note of local interest: "Departure" contains the lines: "A free-fall motorcycle hang glider/Hung on the line like a poison spider/Win a eulogy from William Greider.")

Why William Greider?

Uh, cause it rhymes with hang glider. And spider. He's the Rolling Stone political writer, right? I don't know. It just came out. Tell them it's an honor.