Lee Ranaldo Quotes
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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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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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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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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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I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We'd been on Geffen for a long time, and I think we felt that we needed a change. I just don't think we felt very close to the people at the label after all this time or that they understood what we were trying to do. I don't have any regrets, because at the time we signed with Geffen, it was the right thing to do.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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'Europe '72' came out right around the time that I started going to see the Dead, and it had a huge impression on me.