Sonic Youth Quotes
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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.
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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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I do retweet some of the things that people say about the things I've done, but I don't necessarily want to use it to promote myself because I find that it gets kind of boring. There should just be a whole different site for that. Because it's just kind of boring and gross to use it just self-promotion.
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What Nirvana's success means is that certain radio stations now have their ear more cocked to bands like us; they're more open to playing more stuff.
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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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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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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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Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music.
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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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Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.
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I've never been a huge Zeppelin fan, much to the chagrin of everybody else in my former band. But certainly those Pink Floyd records, I was really into them, especially 'Dark Side of the Moon.'
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In the week following Sandy, we weren't flooded, but we were without everything else - I ended up living by candlelight - no phones, no computers, no light, no power. If we took a walk at night to go and find something to eat, it was completely black, with no lights coming out of the windows, no street lights: a very apocalyptic feeling.
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I gravitated to New York City in the late '70s to pursue a career in visual art, which is what I trained in at university.
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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.
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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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A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.
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I absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.
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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.
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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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I guess, from the beginning, Thurston and Kim were the dominant singers in the band, and although I was singing in bands previously, I guess I mainly deferred to them a lot in terms of who was singing the bulk of the songs.
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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.
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There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.
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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.