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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone’s life. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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.’ Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
