Top 30 Sonic Youth Quotes

I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music – it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I’m drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth – they are all in there.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically – quite frankly, it wasn’t something we were really that interested in.

I’ll always remember listening to Mark Radcliffe playing Sonic Youth. I felt this instant connection, it offered me a peak behind a curtain into this world that I’d never experienced. I wanted to be part of it.

I’ve been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it’s good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon’s voice and Thurston Moore’s voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

There’s only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.

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.

I really do prioritise humour in people. It’s a sign of intelligence. One of the most important things I heard that moulded me was Derek and Clive. That sense of release when I heard them for the first time, crying and laughing, was akin to seeing Sonic Youth for the first time.

The group disbanded prematurely in 1983, but its records made a sizable mark: Mission of Burma became a band’s band; leaving noticeable impressions on the likes of Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo.

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.

Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.

I never really thought of myself as a musician. I’m not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

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.

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.

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.

Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands.

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.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

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.

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.

I’ve been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I’ve always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I’ve never released it.

I don’t know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.

I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you’re doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.

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.

I can’t think about whether I’ll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It’s not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can’t control that.

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

Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There’s three people writing now, and we’ve all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.

‘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.

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.

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.