Lee Ranaldo Quotes

We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.

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.

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.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I’m working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

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.

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.

I’m married to a Canadianm 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.

I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, ‘Film Socialisme.’

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.

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.

We got our first significant pieces of press in the ‘New York Rocker‘ from early gigs at CBGB.

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.

The world is going to end for each of us in a prescribed time, and you sort of understand that your time is limited at a certain point, and you want to get done the things you want to get done. You don’t want to leave things undone, because you only have a limited amount of time.

We’re not really an underground band anymore, and we’re not a mainstream band, either.

One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.

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.

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.

When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone‘s life.

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody’s really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.

I always use the Rolling Stones as the whipping boy for this, but they still play old songs as 90% of their set, and we would die if that were the case.

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.

One thing I always loved about vinyl was the length of a side, around 20 or 22 minutes. That’s the perfect length of an attention span for listening time, you know? You could listen and give it all your attention. Put on something that’s 70 minutes, and nobody‘s sticking around past the first 20 or 30 minutes.

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.

I have great memories of the old Times Square – wouldn’t have missed being here to see that place for the world – but I can also deal with the new Times Square in the overall scheme of N.Y. City 2010.

We’d been on Geffen for a long time, and I think we felt that we needed a change. I just don’t think we felt very close to the people at the label after all this time or that they understood what we were trying to do. I don’t have any regrets, because at the time we signed with Geffen, it was the right thing to do.

When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was.

I absolutely love Las Vegas. I’ve been there a bunch of times on my own.

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.

You don’t work in isolation anymore. Anybody can write a song and put it up on the Internet the next day.

I don’t know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically – quite frankly, it wasn’t something we were really that interested in.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

I read a lot of science fiction, and it’s ingrained, in a certain way, and I’ve been very involved with Kerouac and the Beats, but before that, it was a lot of science fiction.

I saw the Dead in ’73 at Nassau Coliseum, and that same year, I saw them at the crazy, big Watkins Glen festival. It was just outrageous. It was amazing to see the reciprocity between them and their audience.

The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.

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.

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.

‘Daydream‘ brought us to the top of the heap of the indie-college market and recognition by all of our peers; ‘Daydream’ kind of capped off everything we set out to do when we started as a band, in terms of, like, wow, wouldn’t it be great to make a record that a lot of people liked and listened to?

Every band runs its course.

My main pedal is the Ibanez Analog Delay, the AD9 or the AD80, whichever one it is. That’s my go-to pedal for short delay. I don’t think I could live without that pedal.

I’ve never been a huge Zeppelin fan, much to the chagrin of everybody else in my former band. But certainly those Pink Floyd records, I was really into them, especially ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’

‘Europe ’72’ came out right around the time that I started going to see the Dead, and it had a huge impression on me.

Signing to a major, there weren’t many bands from our sphere that were doing it. I mean, obviously R.E.M. had done it, and Husker Du and the Replacements had done it, and maybe Soul Asylum, but that was probably about it. Those four bands were pretty much the only ones from that milieu that had signed to a major.

There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.

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.

During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.

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.

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.

We’re a rock band. We’re proud of it. We’re not an art band, a noise band, or an extreme band.

I’m just old enough to be able to say I got those very first Beatles records right as they were hitting America. My father brought them home. It was definitely the earliest musical influence on my life, and still one of the greatest.