Sonic Youth Quotes
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I'll leave a store if I hate the music. If it's just, like, techno, I feel like my brain is going to explode.
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Signing to a major, there weren't many bands from our sphere that were doing it. I mean, obviously R.E.M. had done it, and Husker Du and the Replacements had done it, and maybe Soul Asylum, but that was probably about it. Those four bands were pretty much the only ones from that milieu that had signed to a major.
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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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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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We're all very sensitive that Jim has the shortest history with the band. He wants to be somewhat of a free agent. I'm just going to let time dictate how Jim's future evolves.
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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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'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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You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.
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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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I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus - having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don't see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it's more exploring a different side of your personality.
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And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice.
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It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.
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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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Kids think of us as being totally over the hill.
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I don't know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.
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I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
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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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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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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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The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.
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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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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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Traditional songwriting, to us, is where the experimental nature comes in. We're all involved with so much outside activity with really hardcore, experimental music-making.