A Quote by Lee Ranaldo

In Sonic Youth, at the end of 'Expressway to Yr. Skull,' we'd tap on the backs of our guitars to get this low-level feedback, and if I leaned forward, and the guitar hung off my body, it would resonate differently.
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.
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.
The music defied classification. If I had been writing a review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive, guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars didn’t always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds. The music dug in so deep you didn’t hear it so much as feel it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid, where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky. That’s the only way I could describe the music. It was the sonic equivalent of flight.
It's cool to play the guitar, but to me it's even cooler to scratch a guitar backward and forward, to manipulate it with a turntable. Guitars can't do that themselves.
I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.
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.
Instead of buying a guitar for $2,000 or $2,500 - I'm not sure how much these are going for - but it's maybe $300 or something like that. It's more for beginners and stuff like that. Obviously it's not hitting the pros. And you can't get the Piezo pickup and the color-changing paint and the inlays and all the fancy things that my signature guitars offer, but you can get the general feel of the guitar - and the body style. It's cool.
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.
I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'
Right backs now should be the highest paid players in every team! Strikers just have to score. Midfielders, they pass. Goalkeepers make saves. Full backs have to mark, cover centre backs and midfield, get forward and cross, take shots and provide the link to strikers.
Physically, we get older and then we die. Yet spiritually, whether we go backward or forward is a matter not of the body but of consciousness. When we think about age differently, then our experience of it changes. We can be physically older but emotionally and psychologically younger. Some of us were in a state of decay in our 20s and are in a state of re-birth in our 60s or 70s. King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men, described his youth as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We can be older than we used to be yet feel much younger than we are.
My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n' roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.
Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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.
No one reads my books until they're finished because I don't want feedback. It confuses me, and it changes things; if I get too much feedback, I get thrown off my path.
At the end of every year, I always get a blood test to see what's on the inside of my body. You've got to see what you put into your body, not just care about the outside of your body - make sure you get in all the supplements and all the protein and all the carbs and the low cholesterol.
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