by Jason Policastro

On the heels of their 16^th studio album “The Eternal”, Sonic Youth visited the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC on July 6^th, for the first of two shows on consecutive nights.  I caught up with their accomplished guitarist Lee Ranaldo for a few minutes on the band’s tour bus for a wide-ranging interview on the new album, upcoming projects, and his hopes for the band’s legacy.  And for the record, he’s an extremely nice guy.

- Sonic Youth has been named as an influence as an influence by bands from Nirvana to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  Does the band regard this as a point of pride, or is it kind of odd to you to be name-dropped constantly while standing outside of mainstream music for most of your career?

“Well I think we’re pretty happy with that positioning, being outside the mainstream yet having some name recognition, which is what it usually what it’s about.  People that have heard of the band, but who haven’t really heard the band.  There’s an awful lot of that, and things like the movie “Juno” have fostered that.  I think we’re pretty happy with where we exist in that whole world.  It’s usually flattering when you’re getting name-dropped, it means you’re having some sort of effect or you stand for a certain type of music or ideology.”

- You recently said that the band would die if it were to follow the Rolling Stones model of filling 90% of its set lists with old songs.  How important is it for you to explore the new material on the road?

“It is super important for us to do that.  We are a live band, and if you don’t have new material you fall into that total nostalgia trip of playing old music.  We’ve got a new record, twelve new songs, and that’s going to make up the bulk of our sets all summer, both because it’s the freshest material which makes it the most fun to play, and it’s stuff we just created and we have a great deal of enthusiasm for it – we feel it’s pretty kickass.  For some people I know it’s a strange thing to hear all new songs, but for us, if we were going to a concert, that’s what we would want to hear from people we love.  We’d want to hear new material and people who are excited about what they are doing right now.  It’s always fun to hear the old songs, but it’s more important for us to stay where we’re at.  When we make a new record it’s important for us to put ourselves in the position of being a new band.  A new band only has an album’s worth of material, and we like that feeling of relying on the newest stuff.  If the latest stuff is no good, it’s time to pack it in.”

- During the tour, have the songs from the new album evolved or taken on different characteristics onstage?

 

“Most of them have.  Partly because of the way we record our music – we write and record them before we road-test them and play them live a lot.  They always mutate and change in front of an audience.  Most of these songs were written that way.  I would love to do a record someday where we wrote a set of material and then played it live for 2 or 3 months before we recorded it.  I think it would be an interesting experiment for us.  I’ve been kind of pushing in that direction for a few years, but we just never find the time to do it.  We never find a way to complete songs without knowing that the album is breathing down our necks (laughs).”

- In a recent review of “The Eternal”, not only is this a band we can admire; now we can love them as well.  Was there any conscious movement in the new record toward a more accessible, song-focused sound, or was this a natural progression for the band?

“There’s never a conscious effort on our part to make a record anything in particular.  We start by getting together, playing music, letting the songs come together and that’s where they go.  There’s certainly no conscious effort to say ‘We need a song-oriented record.’  I certainly think that by leaving Geffen and joining up with Matador, and recently revisiting “Daydream Nation” material, that pushed us in the direction of more rockin’, uptempo stuff.  I think we were all surprised at how ferocious some of that Daydream Nation material really was, and how much fun it was to play because of that.  I think we let that influence the songwriting on this record.”

- The band was recently featured in a New Yorker piece by Sasha Frere Jones, and one of your quotes stuck out for me – “We’re still playing old analogue boxes and electric guitars with guitar amps, recording on tape, mixing on tape.  We haven’t gotten any more professional, thank God.”  Is there a deliberate motivation for avoiding digital recording equipment and techniques?

“Our motivation is mostly our ears and what we think sounds good.  Whether we think that sounds good because we grew up in the days when that’s what sound was like or whether it really sounds better is debatable at this point.  I think a lot of people feel that for rock n’ roll there’s a certain warmth and immediacy to analogue recording that is denied by digital recording.  We just haven’t heard anything that sounds better.  That’s the main reason- it sounds really full and warm, and less plastic than a digital recording.”

- In the early days, the band embraced the do-it-yourself approach - Thurston had his own magazine that he published for a few years, the band released 7' singles, and used photocopied art for album covers.  What parallels, if any, do you see between those kinds of tactics and the entrepreneurial freedoms that the internet affords artists – Myspace, home recording, Youtube, etc.? 

“In a certain way it has improved in a lot of ways in terms of access.  It’s been good and bad -  a lot of people have more access, but it also means that there is far more stuff to wade through than ever before.  You can approach the internet in the same way that we were photocopying our early album covers.  The internet can be a very homemade kind of thing if you want it to be.  We’re kind of into that – it’s kind of the modern version of what we were experiencing when we were starting out.  When were we starting the American hardcore scene was taking off and it was this group of people from town to town, keeping in touch with postcards, phone calls, and ‘zines.  This is what the internet has become, and it serves a similar function.”

- In an interview with The Quietus, Thurston and Lee talked about thoughts the band had about a possible longer, free-form album that might be on the other end of the spectrum of the new album’s punchier, song-oriented structure.  Is there an end of this spectrum that the band feels more comfortable on?

“Not really.  We’re most comfortable going back and forth like a pendulum between these two poles.  There are records that get more stretched out, and records that are more concise.  It really depends on where we’re at, and what we feel like we’ve had enough of for a while.  We can develop a record like Washing Machine with a song like Diamond Sea with a song that’s like 20-25 minutes long, or a lot of other songs that are lengthy, but it’s really poles that swing back and forth for us.  At the moment there seems to be so much improvised music out there that it’s more interesting for us on our proper records to stick to more concise songs that grow and shape in different ways live.  We still have our SYR label where we put out more abstract, longer-form compositions.  It’s nice to have both sides, because both sides are equally important in this band.”

- The band came up at a time when collaboration was far more common between musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, etc., and this cross-discipline work has always been something the band has been active in.  I wanted to get your take on these kinds of scenes – do you think we’ll ever see this phenomenon in modern music again?

“I don’t think we’ve seen the last of that, there will always be people getting together in real time to start a band, a club or a movement.  That’s kind of what it was like in New York when we were starting out.  It was very hermetic, a very closed-in group of people – there’s certainly a lot more access right now.  Those kinds of scenes, you can’t predict where they’re going to pop up.  We did come up at a time when this mix of disciplines of artists was very strong, and it’s reflected in what we do.  We have this huge museum show touring in Europe right now called ‘Sensational Fix’.  It’s kind of representative of where we come from – it’s got art that we’ve done, and from people we’ve collaborated with like Richard Prince and Raymond Pettibone.  Tons of other people, people that have influenced us, famous artists, unknown kid artists, young artists, noise musician artists, all kinds of stuff.  It’s kind of a visual corollary to what we do when we go on tour live, because it’s touring too, on its fourth or fifth museum right now.”

- The band has mentioned in the past how it is important to draw inspiration from new

bands and new music.  Are there any bands making music right now that you find especially exciting or inspiring as a musician?

“Well there are always a lot.  We’re into this band Endless Boogie that’s playing before us here tonight.  Thurston’s releasing this album with this group The Entrance Band that’s been touring with us for a while.  Awesome Color is still a band that’s been developing that we’re interested in.  God there’s just so many bands out there it’s hard to single them out at the moment.  There’s an awful lot of good stuff going on.”

- I’ve heard about a potential Sonic Youth boxed set, with various artists contributing photos and art related to the band.  Beck is apparently re-working “EVOL” as part of the set.  Can you offer us any info on the project?

“Beck covered the entire record.  It’s a boxed set, but it’s not mostly music, it’s an artist box we’re doing with this book publishing company and we’ve invited a whole bunch of people to contribute something, and what they’ve contributed is up to them.  We’ve got fanzines, record jackets, music, videos, posters, and other artwork.  Yoko Ono gave us a badge (shows jacket pin).  It’s a really cool list of people who have given us different things, and we’re still kind of working on it.  In the fall we plan on finalizing it.” 

- What do you hope the band’s legacy will be when you’re gone?

“I hope it will be more about the music than anything else.  I hope it lasts on that level, which I think it probably will.  Other than that, I think we’ve had a certain attitude that we’ve maintained over the course of our career where we haven’t really been swayed by fame, or ego,  or money, or anything else than keeping our focus on the music.  That’s been very important to us.