June 30th, 2009
Interview: Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo
Nearly 30 years in and Sonic Youth continues to do it, and do it well. The quintet’s new album, The Eternal, easily ranks as one of their finest, and if you’ve seen them live in recent years, you know that they’re far from tiring of what they do. SY comes to town on Thursday; we caught up yesterday afternoon over the phone with guitarist Lee Ranaldo:
How are you? Feeling all right?
Yeah I’m doing good. We’re just getting underway — last night was the first night where we pretty much tried to play almost every song from the new record in the set, and we’re gettin’ there, we’re definitely gettin’ there on everything.
Are you feeling good about the way the new songs translate onto the stage?
Yeah, you know, we’re still kinda feeling our way into that, but yeah, so far I’m really really liking what’s going on with them.
So you’re playing the whole new record at the Philly show?
Pretty much. I mean, that’s usually our way when we’ve got a new record. We’re excited about playing the new stuff, the stuff that we’ve just written.
What’s been your take on the reaction to the record, as far as from the critics or the fans?
In terms of, do we look at the reviews and whatnot?
Yeah.
Of course we do, and we’ve been very pleased to see that it’s been pretty positive so far, which is great for us.
Have you always been interested in the feedback, the way your art is received?
You know what, we’ve always been interested to see what people have been writing about us. It’s never in the regard of…it doesn’t ever sway what we do, but you put work out there and you have an idea what your purpose is or what the meaning of it is or however you wanna say it, and it’s oftentimes very different from the way somebody on the outside looks at it. So for us it’s always interesting just to see how other people interpret this stuff that we’ve thought one way about. All of a sudden you get another perspective. A good critic, or a good interpretation of a work, can open your eyes to stuff you didn’t even see yourself. So that’s always interesting. And I think we read the negative reviews with at least as much interest as the positive reviews, just to see what people are making of it. It’s always interesting to dabble in it.
I guess that ties into a sorta long-standing philosophical debate about which is more important: The artist’s vision, or the way the art is interpreted by the audience…
Well, you know, from the perspective of the artist — me being the artist — we have to remain true to our vision. We’re certainly not trying to tailor what we do to anyone’s expectations or desires or, you know, impressions of what Sonic Youth is or should be. We just gotta go with what we think is the best thing to do, even if it is on occasion not the most popular decision, or a decision some people find baffling or unintelligible or whatever it is. We just gotta go ahead and follow all of our hearts with it.
How much time do you spend thinking about the ground you’ve already covered — looking back and reminiscing and whatnot — versus thinking about what’s on the horizon?
Well, I would say I’m mostly concerned with what’s next, although because we’re a band with such a long history, there’s always either legacy projects — like archival projects we’re working on — or, like, last summer or two summers ago or whatever it was, we went out and played Daydream Nation, so there’s always things that draw you into thinking about where you’ve been. It’s certainly more interesting to think about where you’re gonna go, but it’s kind of a nice balance. When we did those Daydream Nation shows, we weren’t initially very interested in doing that kind of thing, to “play the fans’ favorite album” kinda thing. We finally got talked into doing it, and it actually opened up a window on a certain period in our career that maybe we’d kind of forgotten a little bit about.
Really? How so?
I think we were really impressed with the ferocity of those songs, and had kind of forgotten about that. That was a good thing for us — I think it certainly influenced aspects of the new record, for one thing, and just, you know, it gives you a window on who you’ve been over the course of a 30-year career.
Yeah, I guess like anyone, you’re not quite the same person today as you were 10 or 20 years ago, so in a sense it’s probably strange to go back and encounter the older version of the “creative you,” and all the positive and negative memories that might accompany that?
Yeah…thankfully, I have to say, it’s mostly positive memories. It’s looking back on your career and what you’ve done, and that’s interesting. And on a similar note, we have this — I don’t know if too many people know about it here in the States because it’s mostly been something that’s been happening in Europe — but we have this big traveling museum art show that’s going around Europe right now, it’ll hopefully come to the U.S. before it’s through, but it’s a show based on artwork that we’ve created and collaborations we’ve done with a lot of the people who’ve done our album covers and things like that, and a huge list of artists that we’ve been inspired by or young kids we think are interesting young artists. And putting that together really made us look back over our entire career in another light — sort of music aside for a second– and all these other artistic levels that we’ve touched on. So all that stuff keeps you tied into your history, you know? I think for us, we don’t have a problem leaving our history behind and moving on to new work. The new things are certainly the most exciting things. But the history is there and there’s no denying it. It’s something you’re confronted with all the time.
It’s good that you’ve found a balance, because there’s some artists who run away from their legacy, and others who embrace it entirely and don’t ever progress — you’ve found that middle ground.
Yeah.
You know how Joe Strummer often thought of the Clash as a “gang,” that whole “us against the world thing”? Was it ever like that for Sonic Youth — did you ever embody that approach, especially when you started out?
You know, when you say it like that, when Joe Strummer said it, it has a bit of an antagonistic feel to it, or an aggressive feel to it, and I think on some level most bands feel that way. I don’t know if it’s a self-preservation instinct or what, but you’re basically crafting a vision and at least initially, nobody else really understands what it’s all about. And, you know, you have this very intimate bond with the other people in your group because you spend so much time with them — it’s a relationship in every sense of the word, you know? And so there’s definitely a sense of that on a level of, like, maybe you speak a language that’s more intelligible between you all in the group than it is to others. Or you have a little secret code language, having worked together so long. I think that’s probably about it.
You guys Twittered a lot during the making of the record, giving people a bit of a look into the process. I recently had a conversation with another musician where we talked about the merits of maintaining a sense of “mystique” and keeping the fans at arm’s length or whatever, versus being really transparent and letting them know all about you as a person or your creative process. Have you ever had that debate either within yourself or within the band over the years about how much you wanted to let people in?
No, you know, our trip has never been very exclusionary. I mean, it’s always been very much more the opposite of that, it’s been very inclusionary. Our whole notion is one of building a sense of community, so we’ve never consciously wanted to keep people out or keep certain things secret or anything like that, from the guitar tunings to whatever we’re thinking at any given time. We’ve never felt the need to do that. I guess we feel there’s not that much to hide. I think we’re always trying to figure out ways of drawing people into our trip.
I’ve heard from some musicians that in order to maintain the magic, they need to surround themselves with a certain amount of mystique or something, whether that means not doing interviews or just keeping a lot to themselves. And I mean, you guys have been a band for 30 years, so you’ve been around pre-Internet when it was hard to find out a whole lot about bands, and now in the Internet age where you can find out virtually anything and everything about a band as people and how they make their art.
You know what, I don’t think we’ve ever felt we needed to rely on that kind of idea of magic to do what we do. I think our basic attitude is, listen, you either find the music magical on some level, or compelling, or whatever it is, or you don’t. Take it or leave it. Here’s what we do, this is who we are — we’re not pro musicians, we’re not fantastic players or anything like that, we’ve just got this particular thing we’ve been doing and mining for a long time, and, you know, you can come along with it if you like. We’ve never felt the need to manufacture anything in any way, which is a little bit what that sounds like.
Yeah, I think you’re probably right. Creatively speaking, over the years when you’ve written and recorded something you’re really proud of, where you felt like you really nailed it, is that a fleeting feeling of satisfaction because you’re just so busy thinking about the next thing, or does that feeling stick with you to any degree?
Well, part of it sticks with you, but there’s always this sense of, like, you’re only as good as the next thing you do, meaning, you know, you can never really rest on your laurels. I don’t think we ever feel a sense of satisfaction that allows us to coast or anything. And anyway, that’s the way we rise to the challenge. It’s always about what you’re gonna do next, and what you have planned. That’s the most exciting thing.
Have you ever finished an album and still had that small nagging feeling that it could be better, or be different? As a creative person, I imagine nothing can ever be “perfect,” really, but how do you learn to cut yourself a break and let things go?
Well, I mean, I guess we just realized that you can tinker with stuff forever, like, “Oh it’s not ready, I can make it better.” I mean, you can pull this Kevin Shields trip and never release anything because it’s not up to perfection or whatever, and I really think for us it’s more like, we just let it go at a certain point and move on to the next thing. We feel like we do things as absolutely well as we can, and we don’t beat ourselves up over whether it’s good enough or not. We just trust our instincts. But we don’t let anything go out that we don’t feel very confident about.
Did you have that same attitude about creating art when the band first started, or is that an understanding that’s evolved over the years?
I think that’s always the way we’ve been. A lot of our attitudes have been there in those regards right from the beginning. You know, we never imagined we would be perfectionists, let’s put it that way. We’ve just always done the best we could and felt good about it.
What are you the most proud of about this record? What are some of the little moments you’re the most fond of?
I have to say, one of the things I’m most happy with about this record is the fact that for ages and ages now, we’ve made our records where we play live in the studio as a full band — we don’t start with the rhythm section and put guitars over the top — but invariably over the course of making a record you listen back to the track, and when you’re doing those basic tracks you’re really looking for the ultimate drum track because everything else can be fixed or replaced or whatever, and that’s often what happens. You hear something screwy in the guitar track and you’re like, “Oh lemme try to fix that little part,” and then you’re like, “Oh just gimme a new track and I’ll probably be able to play this whole thing better,” and you sorta go to that methodology. And we’ve done that to one degree or another, but with this record we pretty much were all playing live in the studio and we pretty much left everything as it stood when we did the takes. There’s very, very little overdubbing or fixing or replacing of guitar parts and things like that, and I really think it shows in the sound. I think the sound of the record is really cool, and it’s very natural. We weren’t going for the ultimate take, we were going for the take that made us feel good about what we had, and it just feels very natural to me on that kinda level. And I would say the other thing is that it’s kinda funny that for a band that has three singers, it took 28 years to decide to do a record where you have more than one person singing on different tracks, but there’s a lot of that on this record, for us, more than we’ve ever done before. So we have a lot of songs that live, and when we were making the record in the studio, there’s multiples of us singing — like either Thurston and Kim, or me and Kim, or me and Thurston, or all three of us, and as weird as it may sound, it’s really a first for us. And something we really enjoyed doing with this record, and so far been really enjoying doing live, is having the ability to have more than one of us singing on a given song at once. We’ve done that a little bit in the past, but never to the extent we’ve done it on this record.
Do you have any particular memories of playing or hanging out in Philly?
Well, I mean, we come to Philly fairly often. We really like the city. We’ve got some crew members from Philly, and it’s just a really cool city. I really love going there, I love the atmosphere there. I took a holiday there last year with my family — we just spent a week walkin’ around, went to a Phillies game, stuff like that. It was awesome. We’ve played a lot of cool shows there at different places — I can kinda remember different shows there with different opening acts. I don’t really have one memory in particular to pick out, but I definitely really dig the vibe of the city and for sure I’m looking forward to coming down there.
Sonic Youth plays Electric Factory — along with Kurt Vile & the Violators — on Thursday, July 2nd at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25-$27.
