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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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? Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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 Read Quote
