A Quote by 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.
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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.
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.
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.
We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.
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.
Hip-hop has survived as a sonic practice more than anything else. It's an approach to music-making based in sampling and rhyming over beats, that's proven far more versatile than its detractors thought it would.
It's always interesting to me to see people projecting things, like people would say, "This record is much more mature than your other record" and I would think, "Well, this record has more songs from when I was 18 on it than the other one."
Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.
No - not other than making a record that I was satisfied with. That’s usually my only goal - to make it good enough to hopefully put out there. I just tried to finish what I started, as far as my ideas for the record. Hopefully I was able to do it.
'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.
I always just wanted to have the wherewithal to make another record. I never really dreamt of fortune or fame, because it seemed so unlikely. I'm much more interested in people's perceptions of me than what my life is really like. It appears that some people think it's all cocaine and caviar for Okkervil River. And it's not. I'm making a little bit more than I was making at the video store right now.
My favorite record of all time is Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers.' I hold it as the standard - in terms of sonics, sequencing, and songs. It shows that making a complete record is important, rather than just making a single.
I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it.
The live thing is separate from the record for me. I have to figure out a way to make the songs work live. It's always going to be different than it is on a record, because every record I've made, there are people playing parts on there that are not going to be coming on tour with me. As much as still feeling connected to it, it's more like rediscovering.
I'm a little left of center, for sure, with Angels & Airwaves. But even when I get really weird, it's not that weird. It's not like some obscure Sonic Youth record or something. We don't take it quite that far. But what we do like are crescendos, and we do like when a song catches you off guard and it gives you the chills up and down your arms.
I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
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