Sonic Youth Quotes
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When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
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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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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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Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.
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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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Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.
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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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I love Northampton. As exciting and glamorous as New York can be, I'm always really relieved to get back there.
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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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Rock'n'roll saved my soul.
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One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout 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.
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My solo shows require a sit-down, indoor space.
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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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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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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 grew up in the early '70s in New England.
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When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn't matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.
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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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It's not like we set out to antagonize the audience in any way. We're just presenting our music; it's really much more innocent.
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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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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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Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.
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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.