Lee Ranaldo Quotes
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And for me, I think of the group as one in which there's always this pendulum swinging back and forth between writing shorter, more concise pieces until we get kind of sick of it and then writing pieces that get more sprawling and experimental and explore in different directions.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.
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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.
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I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
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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.
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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.
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Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.
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'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?
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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.
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When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
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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.'
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We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
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I absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.
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New York always has a lot of creativity going on.
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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.
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I'm married to a Canadian 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.
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I didn't intend to make one solo record, much less two. It's really a matter of seeing how it goes.
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My solo shows require a sit-down, indoor space.
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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.
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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.
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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.