Lee Ranaldo Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

I'm always into rock n' roll and indie rock.

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

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

Bands such as LiLiPUT and Essential Logic were just as unorthodox as Gang of Four or Wire, even taking their sounds a step further with shrieking vocals and saxophone.

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.

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.

If someone says 'grunge' or 'punk,' you know what the sound is, but if you say 'No Wave,' it's kind of mysterious. That was the most interesting part and should have been the most inspirational thing about it... here's this collective sonic insanity, and none of it sounds anything alike.

I usually get down with a little Violent Femmes in the summer. You know, 'Blister In The Sun.'

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

One of the things that make Liars so fascinating after five albums, each one so completely different from the others, is that even though they play around with all the classic tropes of art-damaged angst-noise perv-rock, they exude a totally cheery and boyish enthusiasm onstage, goofing around with their keyboards and beatboxes.

It's very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things.

As I got older, I fell in love with Radiohead, and 'OK Computer' is one of my favorite albums of theirs. Sonically, the tone of the guitars on tracks like 'Electioneering' just rips right through me.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

The first music I ever got into was the '80s alternative bands that my brother listened to, like The Cure and The Smiths and R.E.M. and Fugazi. I can remember specifically saying The Cure was my favorite band back in second grade.