Lee Ranaldo Quotes

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

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

Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk - pretty quirky.

I'm not an '80s fan. I'm more '70s New York pre-punk kind of thing, and I guess I grew up with '90s grunge, post-punk pop music.

A lot of power-pop comes out of LA, a lot of speed metal comes out of New York.

I absolutely think the Seattle grunge sound was instrumental to my music education.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

I was just a kid in 1987 when I heard of the Pixies, the year after I graduated high school. But I had my band together, and my best friend at the time, Corey Hickock, who was the guitar player in the band that would become STP, Mighty Joe Young, turned me on to the Pixies.

I listen to Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, U2, and it becomes part of me, comes out in my music. Wherever it goes, there will always be the fabric of New Orleans in it.

I listened to Kanye West and also dove deep into bands like Radiohead, Portishead, and Bon Iver.

I don't know if Kim Gordon does collaborations but I'd love to work with her on something one day.

I was born in '76, but I didn't get into rock until the early '90s when the grunge stuff started coming out.

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.

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.

Eric's Trip is still a huge influence on me. The style of those recordings and the rawness of them is very inspiring. And the density of the distorted parts, amazing.

I started making music with my band in the '80s, so I am more product of post punk than classical music, and I have always carried on this way.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

When I was little, people like Talking Heads were on the radio. There was something geeky yet groundbreaking about them.

I idolised bands like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, who wanted to reach as many people as they could.

I never really followed grunge.