Friday, January 27, 2017

"You're Scotch-Irish, aren't you?" - Michael Stipe of REM

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I had expected some of this. I had met Stipe before, in Athens, Georgia, at the time when R.E.M. had just signed with Warner Brothers and was about to release Green. At the end of the conversation, he began studying my face. "You're Scotch-Irish, aren't you?" he said.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"You have a very Scotch-Irish face."

"I'm not Scotch-Irish."

He reached out his hand and touched the back of it to my face. "You have Scotch-Irish cheekbones," he said. "I'll bet you have that somewhere in your background. I'm very good at figuring out where people came from."

(from this 2003 interview in Esquire magazine)

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