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 Read Quote
Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically – quite frankly, it wasn’t something we were really that interested in. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
I recognise that the whole issue of downloading and intellectual property rights is not an easy one, but on the whole, I’m a fan of downloading, both legal and illegal, and the open-source ethos that it harbours for the future is a good one. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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 Read Quote
When I was in grade school and high school, I did a lot of chorale singing. And the chorus would be tenor, bass, and alto and soprano. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
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. Lee Ranaldo Read Quote
