Lee Ranaldo

Musician

1956-02-03

Quotes by Lee Ranaldo

• 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.

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

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

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.

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

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• 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.

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• '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.

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• 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.

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