Sonic Youth Quotes
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I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
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I have to reign myself in a lot.
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I certainly don't sit around in the morning making pancakes listening to Whitehouse or anything.
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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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It's hard for bands to stick it out because people grow up, and it never really pays off. If you're looking for some sort of payoff, it's not gonna happen.
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Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.
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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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Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.
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Everyone's so interior now, they're not really looking around them. They're on their phones.
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I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
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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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Rock'n'roll saved my soul.
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Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.
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A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.
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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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We're playing all these weird festivals, usually outdoors.
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Kids think of us as being totally over the hill.
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Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.
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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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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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I love Northampton. As exciting and glamorous as New York can be, I'm always really relieved to get back there.
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In Sonic Youth, at the end of 'Expressway to Yr. Skull,' we'd tap on the backs of our guitars to get this low-level feedback, and if I leaned forward, and the guitar hung off my body, it would resonate differently.
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A friend of mine introduced me to Thurston Moore because she thought I would like him. He was playing with the tallest band in the world, the Coachmen. They were sort of like Talking Heads, jangly guitar, Feelies guitar. Anyway, it was love at first sight. His band broke up that night. And we started playing.
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We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.