Sonic Youth Quotes
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Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn't matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone's ideas get contributed to it.
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We're a rock band. We're proud of it. We're not an art band, a noise band, or an extreme band.
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We're not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We're pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we're creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.
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I've always been an acoustic guitar player, and I've pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.
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I think Thurston's and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band's 30 years - aside from covers - there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.
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'Europe '72' came out right around the time that I started going to see the Dead, and it had a huge impression on me.
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Obviously, for Geffen, if it wasn't for us, it's quite possible that bands like Nirvana or Beck would not be on the label.
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We never notate our music, so you can try to replicate it, but you don't really have it.
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I recognise that the whole issue of downloading and intellectual property rights is not an easy one, but on the whole, I'm a fan of downloading, both legal and illegal, and the open-source ethos that it harbours for the future is a good one.
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When I first learned guitar - when I was 14 or 15 - I had an older cousin who showed me some stuff. And he was into all these tunings. He was showing me tunings that people like David Crosby or Neil Young used - like dropped D and open D tunings.
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Whenever I work on an album and the time comes to do all the artwork, the only thing I think of is the LP artwork. When we worked on the 'Electric Trim' artwork, we spent weeks and weeks making the LP artwork great, and then the CD artwork came together in a day or two. The LP is what's important to me.
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I'm a mom, but I don't always want to look just like that.
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I've been lucky enough to be in this amazing band, and to me, a band is really a collaborative unit, and that's definitely been what Sonic Youth has been.
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My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.
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I've always played acoustically - it's how I learned. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dylan and what have you.
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People assumed we called the record 'Murray Street' because of its proximity to the World Trade Centre, but that wasn't it at all. Before the attacks, I had simply been walking around taking pictures of things, and I had this photograph of the street sign. We felt it was somewhat evocative and decided to use it on the back cover of the album.
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As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.
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I don't really care about, Oh I really have to sell these things.
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One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.
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I ride a bicycle. I make artwork and do other kinds of stuff - but in terms of unwind, I like to play tennis and ride.
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I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.
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I never go back and listen to the recorded document. The thrill comes when the balance can be attained. Everyone in the room can have a shared, communal rock experience.
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By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.
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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.