Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by Lee Ranaldo - Page 2

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.

I'm so used to knowing what to do with an electric guitar and amplifier, but with an acoustic guitar, it's different, but I still have an amp and a whole bunch of pedals.

Usually my records are made trying to capture the essence of a band playing in a room.

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 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.

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.

The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.

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

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.

New York always has a lot of creativity going on.

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

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

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.

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.

It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.

I always think that, for me, being someone who comes out of electric guitar experimentation, the idea of playing acoustic guitar is, in itself, kind of a radical move.

We always operated within a sense of community not just about the band. It's important to the way we define ourselves. It's the entire world in which we operate.

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.

I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.

To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.

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.'

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

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

After Hurricane Sandy, my family and I stayed in our apartment in lower Manhattan before things normalized. We're lucky enough to live on a bit of high ground, so we weren't flooded... but it was intense. Since there was no light, water, or electricity, I spent a lot of time playing acoustic guitar in the evenings.

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.

Sonic Youth has always been the vehicle for my writing, you know, because it's a collective songwriting entity: we write our songs as a group.

Bands rise and surface in the British press so regularly that, for the most part, unless something really catches my ear, I feel like, 'Oh, if they're still around in two years, I'll see what they're up to.'

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.

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.

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 grade school and high school, I did a lot of chorale singing. And the chorus would be tenor, bass, and alto and soprano.

I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.

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

I came late to Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention. I don't know why, but that's the beauty of music - songs and voices are there when you need them, when you're ready to find them, whether in their time or after.

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.

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.

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

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

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.

Of course you want to keep making good records, but I think there were certain aspects to the indie rock situation at that point where we were pushing the envelope a little bit too far. We weren't happy with the distribution we were getting, and a few other things. So for a lot of ways it made sense for us to jump to a major label right then, and it made sense in terms of challenging ourselves to put ourselves in new situations.

In a certain way, we felt almost like spies in the major label world. We were coming from some other world, and we somehow got our foot in the door and crept in and were prowling around, checking things out and taking back reports from the front.

We've been around long enough that there have certainly been people at every stage of our career telling us about one or another record being influential to their lives in one way or another. It's always nice to hear that stuff.

We're obviously not a platinum-selling band, and yet we've managed to maintain a career on a major label through all this time, and I think we always felt like we were, to a certain degree, infiltrators there. And it's been an interesting thing. It's all been like a big art project for us.

This was early '90s and in New York hip-hop was coming on really strong; that was the sort of urban folk music that was almost threatening to eclipse rock music and indie rock music in terms of popularity, which it has certainly gone on to do. But you know, this is the end of the 1980s, beginning of the '90s. The whole independent label thing has really evolved to this incredible point from the early '80s when we started, and there wasn't one record label at all, until a couple people started forming these small labels.

And for me, I think of the group as one in which there's always this pendulum swinging back and forth between writing shorter, more concise pieces until we get kind of sick of it and then writing pieces that get more sprawling and experimental and explore in different directions.

Certainly our records could be found in most of the mom and pop indie stores, but we still found there were a lot of major stores that weren't on the tip of knowing what was happening and weren't stocking our records as readily as they were stocking, you know, Guns 'n' Roses or Billy Joel or whatever the hell. That certainly changed, and it changed rapidly after Nirvana's rise, that's for sure.