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We've been around long enough that there have certainly been people at every stage of our career telling us about one or another record being influential to their lives in one way or another. It's always nice to hear that stuff.
Lee Ranaldo 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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.'
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
'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?
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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 Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
My solo shows require a sit-down, indoor space.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth