Lee Ranaldo

“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 diff...”

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

“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 aco...”

“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 everyon...”

“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 usin...”

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

“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...”

“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 co...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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 mak...”

“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.”