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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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
Kids think of us as being totally over the hill.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
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.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
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.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth
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My parents lived by Rancho Park. And my mom, later in life, got into playing golf. She and her male cronies would get up at five in the morning and sneak onto the back nine. I kind of just started getting into it. For a long time, I was really puzzled by why people liked it.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I grew up in the early '70s in New England.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
It's American Alternative radio stations that bug me. We're considered Alternative, but don't expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and Offspring. We're hardly of that generation.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth
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We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
No one really gets rich doing this. A couple people do, Black Sabbath does. We don't sell any records anymore.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
My solo shows require a sit-down, indoor space.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
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.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth
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Signing to a major label was an experiment for us. It was a challenge: working in a big studio with a producer was a challenge in a lot of ways. It all shaped what the band went on to become through the '90s. After we made 'Goo,' we went out and toured with Neil Young in ice hockey arenas for three months, and that was the same kind of thing.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Being someone who plays gigs and finding many, many memorable ones in different ways, I guess I'd have to say I don't really have a single favourite one that I could pick out.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
New York always has a lot of creativity going on.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth