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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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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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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 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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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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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.
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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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New York always has a lot of creativity going on.
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I've been sort of writing sketches for songs on my own forever and putting them down on cassette tapes. Yet for years and years and years, my main songwriting outlet was as a member of Sonic Youth, and for most of our time together, our best songs were written in a group setting, where the four of us were getting together in a room.
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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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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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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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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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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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The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.
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Every band runs its course.
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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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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 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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We used to have endless discussions with journalists about that: 'Why are you calling it noise? It's not noise, it's music,' and make references to everybody from John Cage to whoever.
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One thing I always loved about vinyl was the length of a side, around 20 or 22 minutes. That's the perfect length of an attention span for listening time, you know? You could listen and give it all your attention. Put on something that's 70 minutes, and nobody's sticking around past the first 20 or 30 minutes.
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We're not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We're pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we're creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.
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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.