QUOTES by Lee Ranaldo
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We always operated within a sense of community not just about the band. It's important to the way we define ourselves. It's the entire world in which we operate.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
We got our first significant pieces of press in the 'New York Rocker' from early gigs at CBGB.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
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.
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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.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.
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You don't work in isolation anymore. Anybody can write a song and put it up on the Internet the next day.
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I always think that, for me, being someone who comes out of electric guitar experimentation, the idea of playing acoustic guitar is, in itself, kind of a radical move.
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I have nothing against change or evolution, and I'm not one of those people who wants the city to be what it was 40 years ago or whatever, because that's not what New York is, really.
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I've been lucky enough to be in this amazing band, and to me, a band is really a collaborative unit, and that's definitely been what Sonic Youth has been.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
In the week following Sandy, we weren't flooded, but we were without everything else - I ended up living by candlelight - no phones, no computers, no light, no power. If we took a walk at night to go and find something to eat, it was completely black, with no lights coming out of the windows, no street lights: a very apocalyptic feeling.
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I've always played acoustically - it's how I learned. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dylan and what have you.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.
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During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.
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.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
We'll go in one direction with one album, and then we like to do the opposite right away. But it's not like we ever have an idea before we start - that would be too artificial. It all starts from just sitting in a room and playing.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
As a rock fan, you read of the big labels and the multinationals and the big tours with road crews and semi-trailers full of gear, and playing stadiums. In the '90s, that's what we did.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
I gravitated to New York City in the late '70s to pursue a career in visual art, which is what I trained in at university.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn't matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone's ideas get contributed to it.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
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'Europe '72' came out right around the time that I started going to see the Dead, and it had a huge impression on me.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was.
Quote by -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.
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I guess I see 'Goo' half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
Signing to a major, there weren't many bands from our sphere that were doing it. I mean, obviously R.E.M. had done it, and Husker Du and the Replacements had done it, and maybe Soul Asylum, but that was probably about it. Those four bands were pretty much the only ones from that milieu that had signed to a major.
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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.
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I always use the Rolling Stones as the whipping boy for this, but they still play old songs as 90% of their set, and we would die if that were the case.
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Obviously, for Geffen, if it wasn't for us, it's quite possible that bands like Nirvana or Beck would not be on the label.
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Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
One thing I always loved about vinyl was the length of a side, around 20 or 22 minutes. That's the perfect length of an attention span for listening time, you know? You could listen and give it all your attention. Put on something that's 70 minutes, and nobody's sticking around past the first 20 or 30 minutes.
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I read a lot of science fiction, and it's ingrained, in a certain way, and I've been very involved with Kerouac and the Beats, but before that, it was a lot of science fiction.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
Bands rise and surface in the British press so regularly that, for the most part, unless something really catches my ear, I feel like, 'Oh, if they're still around in two years, I'll see what they're up to.'
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo
The world is going to end for each of us in a prescribed time, and you sort of understand that your time is limited at a certain point, and you want to get done the things you want to get done. You don't want to leave things undone, because you only have a limited amount of time.
Quote by -Lee Ranaldo