My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.

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.

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.

I'm just old enough to be able to say I got those very first Beatles records right as they were hitting America. My father brought them home. It was definitely the earliest musical influence on my life, and still one of the greatest.

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.

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.

I didn't intend to make one solo record, much less two. It's really a matter of seeing how it goes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.

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.

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.

The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.

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.

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.

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.

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.