Sonic Youth Quotes
- All Quotes
- News Quotes
-
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.
-
I have to reign myself in a lot.
-
I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.
-
I certainly don't sit around in the morning making pancakes listening to Whitehouse or anything.
-
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.
-
Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.
-
I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
-
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.
-
Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.
-
Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.
-
Kids think of us as being totally over the hill.
-
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.
-
'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?
-
I'm married to a Canadian so I have a lot of fond thoughts about Canada. I think about the prairies of Manitoba, where my wife is from, and I have a lot of friends and relatives on both coasts and have spent a lot time in Canada from Nova Scotia to B.C. In some ways, it's a much more sane country than the U.S.
-
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.
-
Everyone's so interior now, they're not really looking around them. They're on their phones.
-
A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.
-
We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We're playing all these weird festivals, usually outdoors.
-
Rock'n'roll saved my soul.
-
Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.
-
When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone's life.