Lee Ranaldo Quotes

In the old days, maybe we'd come across Captain Beefheart, buy a record, go, 'This is great!' and notice how his music is evolving, changing, and becoming more complex, more radical. And we would follow that progression and see it reflected in the alternative culture it came from.

I'm always trying to come up with something new and unique. I do a beatbox with a harmonica.

I love all Yes music and love to play it live, but I'm most interested in making new music with Yes.

I'm the renegade of funk. I've made house, techno, rock, funk, reggae... That's why I've been on so many different labels.

I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

People like Jeff Buckley, the Mars Volta and Bjork made me listen to music differently. You learn the voice is an instrument you can do crazy things with.

I like to experiment when it comes to music.

At the time, 'Oxygene' was considered a totally 'far out' concept... What was 'in' at the time was disco, hard-rock, and the early days of punk... and moreover, 'Oxygene' was instrumental. And I was French!

'Waking the Fallen' truly encompasses everything that Avenged Sevenfold was at that time. It was us being fearless, us showing our roots in heavy metal, punk, rock n' roll, and not being afraid to try everything under the sun when it comes to writing music.

Bjork for sure. Definitely, I would like to do like something with Tommy Genesis, too. There's a lot of people actually.

The 11-minute 'Colouring of Pigeons' takes The Knife's experimental, cerebral side to new heights.

Those late '60s early '70s bands would take it really far out and get super-weird.

When I was growing up, I was always looking for the most willfully uncommercial music: Whether it was Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or King Crimson, that's what attracted me.

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things.

I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.

I come from hip hop for sure, and there are basic elements of that, but then I'll take from somewhere else, like samba, and do it with trap drums. I like going places other people haven't gone before.

The tapes we were making would jump around with different styles, just quick parts of different songs. Hip-hop to jazz to funk to whatever else. And in a way, 'Check Your Head' ended up being like one of those pause-tapes.

I was doing the Klaus Schulze noise-kid thing before it became interesting to people.

I spent my whole musical career trying to be different and make songs that people think shouldn't go together... go together.

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.

Just based on the primary adage of the necessity breeding innovation, it was just like 'Well, what makes me the guitar player that I am?' and I feel like I listen to so much different music, and I'm a student of so many genres of music, and I feel like it's fun to apply those things and anything super applicable to any type of music.

I guess you could call my music progressive, pop, rock.

We wanted to be like Radiohead. When they started experimenting with electronic music, it gave us the idea that it might be a cool idea to do.

I'm actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I've actually experienced, and I don't think that's very common.