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

The group disbanded prematurely in 1983, but its records made a sizable mark: Mission of Burma became a band's band; leaving noticeable impressions on the likes of Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo.

Anthony Fantano

I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music - it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I'm drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth - they are all in there.

Colson Whitehead

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

Daisy Berkowitz

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

David Bowie

I never really thought of myself as a musician. 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.

Kim Gordon

Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.

Kim Gordon

I can't think about whether I'll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It's not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can't control that.

Kim Gordon

There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.

Kim Gordon

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

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

Lee Ranaldo

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.

Lee Ranaldo

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

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

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

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.

Lee Ranaldo

I've been sort of writing sketches for songs on my own forever and putting them down on cassette tapes. Yet for years and years and years, my main songwriting outlet was as a member of Sonic Youth, and for most of our time together, our best songs were written in a group setting, where the four of us were getting together in a room.

Lee Ranaldo

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

'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.

Lee Ranaldo

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

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