Lee Ranaldo Quotes
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Of course you want to keep making good records, but I think there were certain aspects to the indie rock situation at that point where we were pushing the envelope a little bit too far. We weren't happy with the distribution we were getting, and a few other things. So for a lot of ways it made sense for us to jump to a major label right then, and it made sense in terms of challenging ourselves to put ourselves in new situations.
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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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'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 you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone's life.
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Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.
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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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I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
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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.
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The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.
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It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.
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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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I don't know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.
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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.
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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 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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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.
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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'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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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 absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.
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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.
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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.
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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.