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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
New York always has a lot of creativity going on.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Every band runs its course.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone's life.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
We're a rock band. We're proud of it. We're not an art band, a noise band, or an extreme band.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth