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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 -
As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I ride a bicycle. I make artwork and do other kinds of stuff - but in terms of unwind, I like to play tennis and ride.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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Like everybody else, I love a good pop song. You know, there's nothing like it. I also just really like music that goes off on extended forays of extrapolation into different areas. So it's kind of nice to be able to move between those two poles.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I don't know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
'Europe '72' came out right around the time that I started going to see the Dead, and it had a huge impression on me.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Obviously, for Geffen, if it wasn't for us, it's quite possible that bands like Nirvana or Beck would not be on the label.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I think Thurston's and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band's 30 years - aside from covers - there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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I guess I see 'Goo' half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth