Lee Ranaldo

“The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.”

“I've been lucky enough to be in this amazing band, and to me, a band is really a collaborative unit, and that's definitely been what Sonic Youth has been.”

“During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.”

“I've been sort of writing sketches for songs on my own forever and putting them down on cassette tapes. Yet for years and years and years, my main songwriting outlet was as a member of Sonic Youth, and for most of our time together, our best songs were written in a group setting, where the four of us were getting together in a room.”

“I'm so used to knowing what to do with an electric guitar and amplifier, but with an acoustic guitar, it's different, but I still have an amp and a whole bunch of pedals.”

“'Daydream' brought us to the top of the heap of the indie-college market and recognition by all of our peers; 'Daydream' kind of capped off everything we set out to do when we started as a band, in terms of, like, wow, wouldn't it be great to make a record that a lot of people liked and listened to?”

“Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn't matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone's ideas get contributed to it.”

“When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.”

“Sometimes it takes us a long time to build up songs, and we really work the structures over and over and build in lots of noisy parts.”

“You don't work in isolation anymore. Anybody can write a song and put it up on the Internet the next day.”

“I think Thurston's and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band's 30 years - aside from covers - there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.”

“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.”

“I didn't intend to make one solo record, much less two. It's really a matter of seeing how it goes.”

“To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.”

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

“I have great memories of the old Times Square - wouldn't have missed being here to see that place for the world - but I can also deal with the new Times Square in the overall scheme of N.Y. City 2010.”

“I have nothing against change or evolution, and I'm not one of those people who wants the city to be what it was 40 years ago or whatever, because that's not what New York is, really.”

“When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone's life.”

“The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.”

“One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.”