Top 70 Lee Ranaldo Quotes

My main pedal is the Ibanez Analog Delay, the AD9 or the AD80, whichever one it is. That’s my go-to pedal for short delay. I don’t think I could live without that pedal.

‘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’d rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.

I ride a bicycle. I make artwork and do other kinds of stuff – but in terms of unwind, I like to play tennis and ride.

You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody’s really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.

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

I have nothing against change or evolution, and I’m not one of those people who wants the city to be what it was 40 years ago or whatever, because that’s not what New York is, really.

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.

The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.

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.

I guess I see ‘Goo’ half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.

Change is always good. It brings you to a new place.

We got our first significant pieces of press in the ‘New York Rocker’ from early gigs at CBGB.

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.

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.

Probably the most fun thing we do in our lives is getting up on stage.

Usually my records are made trying to capture the essence of a band playing in a room.

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.

I gravitated to New York City in the late ’70s to pursue a career in visual art, which is what I trained in at university.

New York always has a lot of creativity going on.

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 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.

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.

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’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.

One thing I always loved about vinyl was the length of a side, around 20 or 22 minutes. That’s the perfect length of an attention span for listening time, you know? You could listen and give it all your attention. Put on something that’s 70 minutes, and nobody’s sticking around past the first 20 or 30 minutes.

We’re a rock band. We’re proud of it. We’re not an art band, a noise band, or an extreme band.

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.

Bands rise and surface in the British press so regularly that, for the most part, unless something really catches my ear, I feel like, ‘Oh, if they’re still around in two years, I’ll see what they’re up to.’

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.

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.

Obviously, for Geffen, if it wasn’t for us, it’s quite possible that bands like Nirvana or Beck would not be on the label.

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.

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.

You don’t work in isolation anymore. Anybody can write a song and put it up on the Internet the next day.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I’m working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

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.

I’m so used to knowing what to do with an electric guitar and amplifier, but with an acoustic guitar, it’s different, but I still have an amp and a whole bunch of pedals.

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.

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.

‘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?

There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.

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.

The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.

We’re not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We’re pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we’re creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.

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.

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

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.

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.

I’m married to a Canadianm so I have a lot of fond thoughts about Canada. I think about the prairies of Manitoba, where my wife is from, and I have a lot of friends and relatives on both coasts and have spent a lot time in Canada from Nova Scotia to B.C. In some ways, it’s a much more sane country than the U.S.

One of the things I loved – or I love still – about this Occupy movement is it’s got a very gentle core. I mean, it’s really decidedly nonviolent in the face of all kinds of situations.

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.