Sometimes, you don’t know where your inspiration’s going to come from.
When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone’s life.
When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was.
I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, ‘Film Socialisme.’
As a rock fan, you read of the big labels and the multinationals and the big tours with road crews and semi-trailers full of gear, and playing stadiums. In the ’90s, that’s what we did.
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.’
When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
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.
My wife’s from Canada, and we’re Canadian citizens.
I read a lot of science fiction, and it’s ingrained, in a certain way, and I’ve been very involved with Kerouac and the Beats, but before that, it was a lot of science fiction.
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.
Being someone who plays gigs and finding many, many memorable ones in different ways, I guess I’d have to say I don’t really have a single favourite one that I could pick out.
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.
We’ll go in one direction with one album, and then we like to do the opposite right away. But it’s not like we ever have an idea before we start – that would be too artificial. It all starts from just sitting in a room and playing.
Sonic Youth was a collective. There’s something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.
Every band runs its course.
Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically – quite frankly, it wasn’t something we were really that interested in.
One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.
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