What Nirvana's success means is that certain radio stations now have their ear more cocked to bands like us; they're more open to playing more stuff.
— Lee Ranaldo
We used to have endless discussions with journalists about that: 'Why are you calling it noise? It's not noise, it's music,' and make references to everybody from John Cage to whoever.
Bands rise and surface in the British press so regularly that, for the most part, unless something really catches my ear, I feel like, 'Oh, if they're still around in two years, I'll see what they're up to.'
Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.
I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.
Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.
When I first learned guitar - when I was 14 or 15 - I had an older cousin who showed me some stuff. And he was into all these tunings. He was showing me tunings that people like David Crosby or Neil Young used - like dropped D and open D tunings.
The world is going to end for each of us in a prescribed time, and you sort of understand that your time is limited at a certain point, and you want to get done the things you want to get done. You don't want to leave things undone, because you only have a limited amount of time.
You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.
You don't work in isolation anymore. Anybody can write a song and put it up on the Internet the next day.
When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn't matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.
I always think that, for me, being someone who comes out of electric guitar experimentation, the idea of playing acoustic guitar is, in itself, kind of a radical move.
I've never been a huge Zeppelin fan, much to the chagrin of everybody else in my former band. But certainly those Pink Floyd records, I was really into them, especially 'Dark Side of the Moon.'
I have great memories of the old Times Square - wouldn't have missed being here to see that place for the world - but I can also deal with the new Times Square in the overall scheme of N.Y. City 2010.
Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.
I've always played acoustically - it's how I learned. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dylan and what have you.
Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.
The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.
It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.
I've been sort of writing sketches for songs on my own forever and putting them down on cassette tapes. Yet for years and years and years, my main songwriting outlet was as a member of Sonic Youth, and for most of our time together, our best songs were written in a group setting, where the four of us were getting together in a room.
Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.
My main pedal is the Ibanez Analog Delay, the AD9 or the AD80, whichever one it is. That's my go-to pedal for short delay. I don't think I could live without that pedal.
When I first moved to New York, I was friends with a lot of dancers - people from Merce Cunningham's company and things like that.
Usually my records are made trying to capture the essence of a band playing in a room.
I read a lot of science fiction, and it's ingrained, in a certain way, and I've been very involved with Kerouac and the Beats, but before that, it was a lot of science fiction.
To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.
New York always has a lot of creativity going on.
When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
I felt like the last thing we did, 'The Eternal,' and the touring we did behind it was some of the strongest stuff we'd ever done, and the band was very much a vital entity.
I came late to Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention. I don't know why, but that's the beauty of music - songs and voices are there when you need them, when you're ready to find them, whether in their time or after.
I have nothing against change or evolution, and I'm not one of those people who wants the city to be what it was 40 years ago or whatever, because that's not what New York is, really.
I've been lucky enough to be in this amazing band, and to me, a band is really a collaborative unit, and that's definitely been what Sonic Youth has been.
Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.
I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
We always operated within a sense of community not just about the band. It's important to the way we define ourselves. It's the entire world in which we operate.
I absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.
We'd been on Geffen for a long time, and I think we felt that we needed a change. I just don't think we felt very close to the people at the label after all this time or that they understood what we were trying to do. I don't have any regrets, because at the time we signed with Geffen, it was the right thing to do.
Like everybody else, I love a good pop song. You know, there's nothing like it. I also just really like music that goes off on extended forays of extrapolation into different areas. So it's kind of nice to be able to move between those two poles.
We got our first significant pieces of press in the 'New York Rocker' from early gigs at CBGB.
When I was in grade school and high school, I did a lot of chorale singing. And the chorus would be tenor, bass, and alto and soprano.
One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.
Sonic Youth has always been the vehicle for my writing, you know, because it's a collective songwriting entity: we write our songs as a group.
After Hurricane Sandy, my family and I stayed in our apartment in lower Manhattan before things normalized. We're lucky enough to live on a bit of high ground, so we weren't flooded... but it was intense. Since there was no light, water, or electricity, I spent a lot of time playing acoustic guitar in the evenings.
I ride a bicycle. I make artwork and do other kinds of stuff - but in terms of unwind, I like to play tennis and ride.
I'm so used to knowing what to do with an electric guitar and amplifier, but with an acoustic guitar, it's different, but I still have an amp and a whole bunch of pedals.
When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone's life.
I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.
One of the things I loved - or I love still - about this Occupy movement is it's got a very gentle core. I mean, it's really decidedly nonviolent in the face of all kinds of situations.
In the week following Sandy, we weren't flooded, but we were without everything else - I ended up living by candlelight - no phones, no computers, no light, no power. If we took a walk at night to go and find something to eat, it was completely black, with no lights coming out of the windows, no street lights: a very apocalyptic feeling.
During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.
