Lee Ranaldo Quotes

I've been making music for a long time, since I was very young, but at the same time, I'm still exploring what works for me. I feel like I'm just starting out.

You could say, 'Oh, we're gonna write the heaviest album of all time' or 'We're gonna write an album that sounds like 'Iowa.'' Even if we set out to try to do so, it would never compare. We're not those people anymore, we're not that band anymore.

That's when we decided to stop in '66. Everyone thought we toured for years, you know, but we didn't. I joined in '62, and we'd finished touring in '66 to go into the studio where we could hear each other... and create any fantasy that came out of anybody's brain.

There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.

For me, making music is a continuous learning experience, and I think that it feeds itself.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old.

The way that I've always gone about making music, the rule of thumb, has just been to make what I love.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

On 'Heartbreaker,' I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs. With 'Gold,' I was trying to prove something to myself. I wanted to invent a modern classic.

I feel like bands should be growing, living, functioning entities and to crystallize a band into a single album, and for that to be a touchstone - I understand it from a fan's perspective but I also feel like it's a little bit misleading in terms of the way bands actually function.

Like many musicians, I don't look back much... only concentrate on what music I'm doing, and occasionally look ahead.

You need the past as a guideline. The history of music is a good basis, but to escape that stuff, that tortuous rulebook, you have to learn it first. It's kind of like religion - once you've written the Bible, that's it, move on.

I don't have any desire to do something that sounds explicitly rock. Like, I don't have a burning need to be a rock musician. I feel like I've taken that as far as I can take it, for me.

So it's not so much that I set out to do something different, it's just that the songs themselves require their own individual voice and attention.

When I started writing, I just wanted to do something different and creative. I first thought neo-soul was a good pathway for me, so I tried that out but realized I didn't want to be placed in that box.

You're always in a different headspace when you make each record, so hopefully they're all different. You just pick up things that you wish you hadn't done on the first one.

There are musicians who go through their lives sort of shedding their skins. For me, I've always felt backward-compatible to Version 1.0.

From activist stage, I just spoke and said whatever I had to say. When the writing started, I would just read it. Then I had the interest into going into musical aspects. When that happened in '86, I liked the result of work we did in the studio.

I never thought of myself as being the singer that wanted to create an identity and then stick to that.

I never left music, I just left the music scene.

I just love being in the studio, and that's kind of what I do when I'm not on the road. I'm just in the studio messing with stuff, and I love playing all the instruments.

Strapping Young Lad is a representation of me, just as much as 'Ki,' 'Ghost,' 'Ziltoid' or 'Infinity.' There's no difference; it was just a different period of time.

Music is a continuous process. You evolve with every song.

Deeper' feels like we did when we made the first few albums. It's got that excitement. It felt like a voyage of discovery.