Stipe: The idea was to present a 21st-century version of an album. What does an album mean in the year 2011, especially to generations of people for whom the word album is an archaic term. An album for me as a teenager in the ‘70s was a fully formed concept. It was a body of work from an artist I liked or trusted or who excited me. Maybe one of the songs is really poppy and you listen to it on the radio as a hit single and then more of the world is about to find out about this artist by buying the record. Then you realize, “Wow, they’re not one-dimensional. They’ve got all these other things that they’re capable of and interested in writing about.” But now we’re in an age of singles. It’s actually always been more about singles for most of music history. But I wanted to reexamine the idea of the album for generations of people who are not my age, who love music or learning about music or are finding this band called R.E.M. or have just previously heard “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts” as their elevator music. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the age of YouTube and the Internet. Not from Kanye West, not from Lady Gaga, not from Beyoncé-they’ve got their place. This is what we do. We put together and sequenced the strongest body of work that we could possibly come up with in this moment in time and put it onto this record. I then went to people we’ve worked with in the past, visually, or artists we admire, and had them collaborate on a film. We have Sophie Calle, James Franco, Jim Herbert-who was my art professor in college-Sam Taylor-Wood, Jim McKay, Tom Gilroy …