A Quote by Lee Ranaldo

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

Lee Ranaldo

Quote Topics

Know Sonic Sonic Youth Sound Vintage Youth

Quote Author

Lee Ranaldo
American - Musician
Born: February 3, 1956

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.

Lee Ranaldo

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.

Lee Ranaldo

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.

Lee Ranaldo

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.

Lee Ranaldo

Every kid has a laptop; everyone can make music, so in order to stand out, I think it's important to find that sonic identity, I think my sonic identity - and mine is finding these weird sounds that may not necessarily sound that musical, and make them sound musical.

Flume

It's very hard to take a character out of nothing, and put a hook on it, especially because it's only sonic. Futurama is a sonic world, and everyone's attention is focused on that sound and that little cartoon image. You can change it.

Billy West

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.

Lee Ranaldo

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.

Lee Ranaldo

Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands.

Stephanie Savage

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

David Bowie

I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.

Kim Gordon

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

Daisy Berkowitz

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

Lee Ranaldo

Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.

Lee Ranaldo

I always have looked at "indie" as a term of "independence." Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant "popular" to me it didn't define a sound. And I think now that has been the context for things. If something is indie, it almost has this sonic association with it, or pop has become this term of shame almost, like, bubblegum sweet pop.