Sonic Youth Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Usually my records are made trying to capture the essence of a band playing in a room.
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My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.
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We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.
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Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.
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The band has a liberal philosophy - that's sort of a given.
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I guess I see 'Goo' half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.
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I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'
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Listening to the Beatles' music figures into pretty much all of my childhood memories.
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'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.
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When I was in grade school and high school, I did a lot of chorale singing. And the chorus would be tenor, bass, and alto and soprano.
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I have nothing against change or evolution, and I'm not one of those people who wants the city to be what it was 40 years ago or whatever, because that's not what New York is, really.
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Our audience seems to be able to handle whatever kind of weird opening acts we turn them on to. I mean, sometimes it happens to be something like a band like Nirvana or Mudhoney, and other times, its just weird noise crews that we dig up.
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You don't work in isolation anymore. Anybody can write a song and put it up on the Internet the next day.
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To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.
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I felt like the last thing we did, 'The Eternal,' and the touring we did behind it was some of the strongest stuff we'd ever done, and the band was very much a vital entity.