Quotes from Lee Ranaldo

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.

Every band runs its course.

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.

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 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.

I came late to Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention. I don't know why, but that's the beauty of music - songs and voices are there when you need them, when you're ready to find them, whether in their time or after.

The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.

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.

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

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.'

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

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

I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.

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.

It's not like we set out to antagonize the audience in any way. We're just presenting our music; it's really much more innocent.

When I first moved to New York, I was friends with a lot of dancers - people from Merce Cunningham's company and things like that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.

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.