A Quote by Lee Ranaldo

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

Lee Ranaldo

Quote Topics

Anybody Anything Before Heard Months Music Rehearse Sonic Sonic Youth Would Wrote 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

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

I wrote 'Love Foolish,' and when I heard the music for the first time, it felt like this was a song that Twice hadn't done before. I thought the song and music had a very mature tone, so I wrote the lyrics to match. I was inspired by the music directly.

Momo Hirai

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

When I first released music, and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before; it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later: now she's an R&B singer.

FKA twigs

I had writers block for months afterwards because I was just so taken aback by all of the sounds I was hearing. It's almost like hearing the most beautiful music you've ever heard, so you're like, "What's the point of me making anything?" It was this living sonic organism so the idea of recording something just seemed like taking this living thing and mummifying it.

Taraka Larson

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

I really do prioritise humour in people. It's a sign of intelligence. One of the most important things I heard that moulded me was Derek and Clive. That sense of release when I heard them for the first time, crying and laughing, was akin to seeing Sonic Youth for the first time.

Roisin Murphy

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

Lee Ranaldo

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

Three 6 Mafia have been around for a long time; we've made a lot of music. Anybody's music can influence anybody. I've heard people say that our music has influenced such and such, and it could be true, and it could not.

Juicy J

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.

Lee Ranaldo

I wrote my sonic meditations and started using them with students. I took a bunch of UCSD students out to Joshua Tree and we did the sonic meditations on the boulders.

Pauline Oliveros

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.