Sonic Youth Quotes
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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I have to reign myself in a lot.
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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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We're playing all these weird festivals, usually outdoors.
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I certainly don't sit around in the morning making pancakes listening to Whitehouse or anything.
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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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And for me, I think of the group as one in which there's always this pendulum swinging back and forth between writing shorter, more concise pieces until we get kind of sick of it and then writing pieces that get more sprawling and experimental and explore in different directions.
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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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'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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I absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.
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We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
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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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Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.
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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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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.