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.
Lee Ranaldo
Listening to the Beatles' music figures into pretty much all of my childhood memories.
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.
'Daydream' brought us to the top of the heap of the indie-college market and recognition by all of our peers; 'Daydream' kind of capped off everything we set out to do when we started as a band, in terms of, like, wow, wouldn't it be great to make a record that a lot of people liked and listened to?
Whenever I work on an album and the time comes to do all the artwork, the only thing I think of is the LP artwork. When we worked on the 'Electric Trim' artwork, we spent weeks and weeks making the LP artwork great, and then the CD artwork came together in a day or two. The LP is what's important to me.
Being someone who plays gigs and finding many, many memorable ones in different ways, I guess I'd have to say I don't really have a single favourite one that I could pick out.
When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
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.
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 recognise that the whole issue of downloading and intellectual property rights is not an easy one, but on the whole, I'm a fan of downloading, both legal and illegal, and the open-source ethos that it harbours for the future is a good one.
When we first started, in the early Eighties, we had some crappy guitars - Japanese knockoffs that wouldn't hold standard tuning. Later, we'd shove drumsticks or screwdrivers under strings to scheme new noises, sure. But initially, open tuning was a technique used to make our cheap guitars sound better. It wasn't academic or conceptual.
I guess, from the beginning, Thurston and Kim were the dominant singers in the band, and although I was singing in bands previously, I guess I mainly deferred to them a lot in terms of who was singing the bulk of the songs.
I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.
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.
Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.
We're not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We're pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we're creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.
Usually my records are made trying to capture the essence of a band playing in a room.
When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone's life.
I'm married to a Canadianm so I have a lot of fond thoughts about Canada. I think about the prairies of Manitoba, where my wife is from, and I have a lot of friends and relatives on both coasts and have spent a lot time in Canada from Nova Scotia to B.C. In some ways, it's a much more sane country than the U.S.
Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.
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.'
We're a rock band. We're proud of it. We're not an art band, a noise band, or an extreme band.
Change is always good. It brings you to a new place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My solo shows require a sit-down, indoor space.
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.
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.
Our audience seems to be able to handle whatever kind of weird opening acts we turn them on to. I mean, sometimes it happens to be something like a band like Nirvana or Mudhoney, and other times, its just weird noise crews that we dig up.
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.
The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.
Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.
Signing to a major label was an experiment for us. It was a challenge: working in a big studio with a producer was a challenge in a lot of ways. It all shaped what the band went on to become through the '90s. After we made 'Goo,' we went out and toured with Neil Young in ice hockey arenas for three months, and that was the same kind of thing.
It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.
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.
I saw the Dead in '73 at Nassau Coliseum, and that same year, I saw them at the crazy, big Watkins Glen festival. It was just outrageous. It was amazing to see the reciprocity between them and their audience.
Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.
Being a guy who was a geek with tape machines in the early days and really interested in how records get made, I was inspired in particular by how the Beatles were innovating when they were making those records late in their career while using the studio in a maximal way.
What Nirvana's success means is that certain radio stations now have their ear more cocked to bands like us; they're more open to playing more stuff.
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.
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.
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.
I have great memories of the old Times Square - wouldn't have missed being here to see that place for the world - but I can also deal with the new Times Square in the overall scheme of N.Y. City 2010.
I didn't intend to make one solo record, much less two. It's really a matter of seeing how it goes.
People assumed we called the record 'Murray Street' because of its proximity to the World Trade Centre, but that wasn't it at all. Before the attacks, I had simply been walking around taking pictures of things, and I had this photograph of the street sign. We felt it was somewhat evocative and decided to use it on the back cover of the album.
It's not like we set out to antagonize the audience in any way. We're just presenting our music; it's really much more innocent.
