One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.
— Lee Ranaldo
Probably the most fun thing we do in our lives is getting up on stage.
We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.
We'll go in one direction with one album, and then we like to do the opposite right away. But it's not like we ever have an idea before we start - that would be too artificial. It all starts from just sitting in a room and playing.
Change is always good. It brings you to a new place.
We're a rock band. We're proud of it. We're not an art band, a noise band, or an extreme band.
Being someone who plays gigs and finding many, many memorable ones in different ways, I guess I'd have to say I don't really have a single favourite one that I could pick out.
I think Thurston's and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band's 30 years - aside from covers - there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.
Our audience seems to be able to handle whatever kind of weird opening acts we turn them on to. I mean, sometimes it happens to be something like a band like Nirvana or Mudhoney, and other times, its just weird noise crews that we dig up.
There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.
I guess, from the beginning, Thurston and Kim were the dominant singers in the band, and although I was singing in bands previously, I guess I mainly deferred to them a lot in terms of who was singing the bulk of the songs.
I've always been an acoustic guitar player, and I've pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.
My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.
I saw the Dead in '73 at Nassau Coliseum, and that same year, I saw them at the crazy, big Watkins Glen festival. It was just outrageous. It was amazing to see the reciprocity between them and their audience.
'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.
Signing to a major label was an experiment for us. It was a challenge: working in a big studio with a producer was a challenge in a lot of ways. It all shaped what the band went on to become through the '90s. After we made 'Goo,' we went out and toured with Neil Young in ice hockey arenas for three months, and that was the same kind of thing.
'Daydream' brought us to the top of the heap of the indie-college market and recognition by all of our peers; 'Daydream' kind of capped off everything we set out to do when we started as a band, in terms of, like, wow, wouldn't it be great to make a record that a lot of people liked and listened to?
One thing I always loved about vinyl was the length of a side, around 20 or 22 minutes. That's the perfect length of an attention span for listening time, you know? You could listen and give it all your attention. Put on something that's 70 minutes, and nobody's sticking around past the first 20 or 30 minutes.
I always use the Rolling Stones as the whipping boy for this, but they still play old songs as 90% of their set, and we would die if that were the case.
As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.
People assumed we called the record 'Murray Street' because of its proximity to the World Trade Centre, but that wasn't it at all. Before the attacks, I had simply been walking around taking pictures of things, and I had this photograph of the street sign. We felt it was somewhat evocative and decided to use it on the back cover of the album.
Obviously, for Geffen, if it wasn't for us, it's quite possible that bands like Nirvana or Beck would not be on the label.
I recognise that the whole issue of downloading and intellectual property rights is not an easy one, but on the whole, I'm a fan of downloading, both legal and illegal, and the open-source ethos that it harbours for the future is a good one.
I gravitated to New York City in the late '70s to pursue a career in visual art, which is what I trained in at university.
My solo shows require a sit-down, indoor space.
We're not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We're pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we're creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.
The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.
I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'
Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.
In Sonic Youth, at the end of 'Expressway to Yr. Skull,' we'd tap on the backs of our guitars to get this low-level feedback, and if I leaned forward, and the guitar hung off my body, it would resonate differently.
'Europe '72' came out right around the time that I started going to see the Dead, and it had a huge impression on me.
Listening to the Beatles' music figures into pretty much all of my childhood memories.
I guess I see 'Goo' half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.
Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.
Whenever I work on an album and the time comes to do all the artwork, the only thing I think of is the LP artwork. When we worked on the 'Electric Trim' artwork, we spent weeks and weeks making the LP artwork great, and then the CD artwork came together in a day or two. The LP is what's important to me.
It's not like we set out to antagonize the audience in any way. We're just presenting our music; it's really much more innocent.
I don't know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.
Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.
As a rock fan, you read of the big labels and the multinationals and the big tours with road crews and semi-trailers full of gear, and playing stadiums. In the '90s, that's what we did.
I'm married to a Canadianm so I have a lot of fond thoughts about Canada. I think about the prairies of Manitoba, where my wife is from, and I have a lot of friends and relatives on both coasts and have spent a lot time in Canada from Nova Scotia to B.C. In some ways, it's a much more sane country than the U.S.
Every band runs its course.
When we first started, in the early Eighties, we had some crappy guitars - Japanese knockoffs that wouldn't hold standard tuning. Later, we'd shove drumsticks or screwdrivers under strings to scheme new noises, sure. But initially, open tuning was a technique used to make our cheap guitars sound better. It wasn't academic or conceptual.
I didn't intend to make one solo record, much less two. It's really a matter of seeing how it goes.
We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn't matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone's ideas get contributed to it.
Being a guy who was a geek with tape machines in the early days and really interested in how records get made, I was inspired in particular by how the Beatles were innovating when they were making those records late in their career while using the studio in a maximal way.
By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.
When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was.
I'm just old enough to be able to say I got those very first Beatles records right as they were hitting America. My father brought them home. It was definitely the earliest musical influence on my life, and still one of the greatest.
Signing to a major, there weren't many bands from our sphere that were doing it. I mean, obviously R.E.M. had done it, and Husker Du and the Replacements had done it, and maybe Soul Asylum, but that was probably about it. Those four bands were pretty much the only ones from that milieu that had signed to a major.
