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 never notate our music, so you can try to replicate it, but you don't really have it.
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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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I've been sort of writing sketches for songs on my own forever and putting them down on cassette tapes. Yet for years and years and years, my main songwriting outlet was as a member of Sonic Youth, and for most of our time together, our best songs were written in a group setting, where the four of us were getting together in a room.
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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.
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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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Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.
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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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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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The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.
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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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We used to have endless discussions with journalists about that: 'Why are you calling it noise? It's not noise, it's music,' and make references to everybody from John Cage to whoever.
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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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Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band, because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.
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Like everybody else, I love a good pop song. You know, there's nothing like it. I also just really like music that goes off on extended forays of extrapolation into different areas. So it's kind of nice to be able to move between those two poles.
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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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The raw and natural sounds of Aero music don't subtract from it's beauty, instead it creates a rich soundscape for the musician to create within.
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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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My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.
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Being a guy who was a geek with tape machines in the early days and really interested in how records get made, I was inspired in particular by how the Beatles were innovating when they were making those records late in their career while using the studio in a maximal way.
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Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.
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When I first moved to New York, I was friends with a lot of dancers - people from Merce Cunningham's company and things like that.