We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Sonic Youth Quotes from Stephanie Savage, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Sufjan Stevens, David Bowie. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands.
I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you’re doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.
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.
I’ve been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I’ve always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I’ve never released it.
There’s only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.
I’ve always been an acoustic guitar player, and I’ve pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.
Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.
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.
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.
Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.
By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.
Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There’s three people writing now, and we’ve all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.
I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music – it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I’m drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth – they are all in there.
Sonic Youth has always been the vehicle for my writing, you know, because it’s a collective songwriting entity: we write our songs as a group.
Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I’m grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.
When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.
I don’t know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.
I can’t think about whether I’ll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It’s not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can’t control that.
When Sonic Youth writes music, we write everything in a very communal way. It doesn’t matter who brought something in initially; it all gets transformed by the band.
I’ll always remember listening to Mark Radcliffe playing Sonic Youth. I felt this instant connection, it offered me a peak behind a curtain into this world that I’d never experienced. I wanted to be part of it.
