Known as the silver-haired Sonic Youth guitarist who actually looks his age, Lee Ranaldo is on the phone from New York to promote his 28-year-old band's latest work, The Eternal. More sporadically weird than its 2006 predecessor, Rather Ripped, Sonic Youth’s 16th album also marks another milestone — the band's move back to their indie roots via Matador Records, following an almost two-decade run with Geffen/Universal. EYE WEEKLY talked to Renaldo about crafting their latest album, the death of the music industry and whether Sonic Youth still sound their age.
How are you, Lee?
Pretty good, pretty good. How’s Toronto?
It’s really hot. And there’s a garbage strike right now.
Oh my god, I hope they’re finished before we get there.
I hope so too. All the garbage men have taped up all the garbage bins, and there are all these signs that say, “Please don’t litter” at the same time.
Wow, that’s funny.
How’s New York right now?
It’s rainy as hell. It’s been raining for a week here. It’s pretty weird.
So I remember reading this interview Thurston Moore did with Michael Azzerad in SPIN where he commented on the dual nature of the name Sonic Youth, claiming that the band also boasts “youthful sonics.” Given that you're 28 years into this, and that your new album is called The Eternal, do you think Sonic Youth sounds well, young?
Well, obviously when we made up the name we didn’t think about being called that 30 years later. But we also didn’t think about it specifically being a reference to youth, in the sense of being young, as much as there’s something about sound and music in general that has a youth quotient to it, if you let it. You know it doesn’t really matter how old you are, it’s more about the attitude you bring to what you’re doing. We may be in our fifties at this point, but the music still retains a certain kind of youthful energy because of our attitude towards it. So maybe between our name and the title of the record, it’s more like a “fountain of youth” thing.
We weren’t young even when we started the band. I mean, we weren’t 18 in a basement somewhere; we were already in our mid-twenties, and had seen a bunch and done a bunch and been through college. So it was more about a state of mind than anything else. I think the new record is as youthful sounding as anything we’ve ever done. We’re really happy about it. I mean, inevitably, you’ve been playing as long as we have, there’s certain elements of maturity that creep in. But we’ve tended to play against that.
We haven’t really gotten more professional over the years. I mean, we’ve learned how to play a little better, but the way we write songs and go about what we do is still as intuitive and anarchic as it ever was. We haven’t taken the opportunity to really formalize things by the way we write music. It’s done by the seat of our pants without feeling like we’ve become professionals, or anything like that. It all keeps us on our toes.
I was reading this New York Times review of The Eternal and the critic commented that your albums are about songs, but they’re not. And they’re about improvising and they’re not. And there’s this push-pull in each track that allows you to explore the idea of constructing a song.
Mm-hmm… well, the thing is — oh, go ahead.
Well, how do you go about constructing a Sonic Youth song? And what is a Sonic Youth song?
Well, we construct it with the four or five of us sitting in a room together and just playing. And sometimes someone will come in with a sketch of an idea, but it’s really constructed by the four or five of us contributing towards the push and pull of where the song is going until it becomes something. Sometimes songs go through crazy changes from one week to the next before it’s settled. It’s really a group process in terms of its development. But one part that makes it interesting is that we don’t even deal with vocals until all the songs are all written.
Really?
So, it’s not like at any point we’re developing songs that are used to hang vocals on. We develop the music as pieces of music. So for us, it really has to hold together as a piece of music you could listen to instrumentally because that’s the way we develop it. The vocals are added long after the fact. We don’t even start thinking about vocals until the songs are already recorded, and all the overdubs are done and then it’s like, “OK, now who’s gonna sing what?” Between all the crazy tunings and what not — we really are developing pieces of music, not so much songs even, that hold together on their own — the problem for the vocalist is how to fit your vocals into this song that may not always run in groups of four, or have typical traditional vocal styling. I think it keeps our music really strong. Lots of bands just develop their music for the vocals. We’re working on tonality, and structure and rhythmic thrust or whatever, we play them a million times in the basement, which is our studio, and it’s really fun.
Our music does have all these elements to it — like, yes they’re songs, there’s improvisation, there’s this, there’s that — and that’s one of the reasons that we’ve never had a gigantic, massive-selling record or anything like that. And then we’ve got three different vocalists all singing about three different kinds of subject matters, and that also keeps things percolating. But it’s also one of the reasons that we keep going. Our music contains so much different stuff in it that it’s like opening the lid to a box where there’s all these different worlds you can go to.
Would you call it a Pandora’s box approach?
Well, I just think that we don’t have a standardized approach. We start with the music and let it show us the way the way we’re gonna go. So it is kind of like that — every time we get together to write new songs, we lift the lid off the box and see what’s coming in and coming out.
It’s kind of amazing, the level of critical respect and authority that follows every time a new Sonic Youth record comes out. But inevitably there’s always some comparison to whatever canonized album seems to have the most relevance.
Right.
Does it get frustrating to have every new album compared to Daydream Nation?
Well, I don’t know about frustrating, as much as it seems like a typical critical way to be. In some cases, it masks a sort of lazy criticism, but people want to compare what they think you’re doing to what they think is you at your best. I understand why it happens and it’s always interesting to read critical thought on your work, whether you agree with it or not. We read the negative stuff just as avidly as we read the positive stuff because you never know what you’re gonna find. I don’t know — it’s typical, I guess is what I would say. It’s typical that it happens.
You’re now signed to Matador after the end of your famed deal with Geffen. But you’ve joined an indie label in a very different indie-rock climate than you saw 20 years ago, with bands like Grizzly Bear now debuting on the Billboard Top 10.
Did they really? Well, people like that Beach Boys stuff.
Do you feel like there’s been a shift in accepting indie rock as something that’s actually marketable?
Well, I think it’s more the fact that record labels have shifted to the point where marketable music can exist on just about any label these days. When we first signed with Geffen [in 1990], the main impetus was to get our records out in more stores. And we were frustrated touring in towns where people were like, “Oh I can’t find your records, where can I get ‘em?” You know, that sucked. So that’s why we went to the major label. But at this point those problems don’t really exist anymore. A label like Matador can put records in just as many stores as Geffen/Universal can. And because they’re selling so much music on the internet, anybody with a website can sell music if they’ve got something that people want.
It seems to be in the past that you’d read about a band like Sonic Youth, or today, Grizzly Bear, and it’d be like that, like “Geez, I can’t find this record anywhere.” Now, you can read about something and no matter how big or how small, you can order their record off Amazon, or iTunes, or wherever you order records from. It’s made the playing field more balanced in a way. In a way, it almost favors the smaller labels; because big labels still have these intense bottom lines for the million-selling artists they’re giving scads of money to, trying to make it up one way or another. They’re still desperate to have records that just make ridiculous amounts of money, whereas a small label that’s just into it for the love of music can put stuff out that they think is great, and they don’t have to go crazy selling it to survive.
Everyone at Matador is super into the music, and into music in general — it's not a corporate feel at all. Towards the end on Geffen, we just felt like, “Well, this is just a big corporate entity that doesn’t really know or care much about music.” They were basically a shill for some vodka company, or whatever owns those labels at this point. It’s super pleasurable for us to be back on a label where people are just interested in music. And it’s not even that you go back to their offices and they’re just talking about Matador artists, they’re just talking about who they went to see last night and what was cool. It’s kinda brought us back to where we really belong, you know?
There was a long period in the 90s where Geffen was really good for us. And it did move our stuff into places where it never would have been available before, and certainly the advances on records allowed us to live decent lives, and all that stuff and actually pursue what we wanted to pursue. But at this point, I think we’re super happy to be out of that situation and back at Matador.
What would be a typical Geffen reaction when you came up with something that was more avant-garde than they were used to?
Well, we learned not to bring that stuff to them, really. We’ve always been good at crafting records of songs in one way or another, even if it was [2000's infamous] New York City Ghosts and Flowers. We’ve always had our reasons behind what we’ve done. So that’s why we started the SYR label that we have, because we realized we had all this other stuff that we wanted to put out. Some of us — Thurston and I especially, but Kim as well –—were releasing stuff on little labels left and right, solo projects and side projects, and really digging the fun of that kind of situation. You could just turn around and release a record every week if you wanted to. And so we started our own label just because we had all this other stuff that we were working on. And thought it was cool just to release this other side of Sonic Youth. We didn’t even bring that stuff to Geffen because we knew it was just beyond their kin, they wouldn’t even know what to do with it. And we would’ve been just shooting them and ourselves in the foot if we tried to get them to release that stuff.
In general our relationship with them was really good for our entire time there. They let us co-exist. They didn’t have to let us release those other records. Technically the way those contracts are written, they had the right to release everything that we did. But I think they realized anything that they had to thwart that in us would just have been crushing who the band was, in a way. So it worked out really good and then it was time to leave. Our contract was up, and we wanted to do more — and we were just like, “Let’s try a different situation.”
But I think it was also good for Geffen because of signing you, they could get like, Blind Melon.
Yeah, or Nirvana or Beck, or stuff like that.
But I guess that’s just the way the business works: you can make an equitable deal with one band and capitalize on that. Kim Gordon recently criticized the Radiohead model of pay-what-you-can downloads because she said that it’s great for a band with the cultural cachet of Radiohead, but most musicians can’t afford to make an album without label support. What do you think about that?
Well I think it was just a comment that she said, and these days, comments get blown up all over proportion. But in essence, I think it’s kind of true. I mean, Radiohead are rich — they can afford to release a record and say, “pay what you want.” But six months later, they came out with a hardcover edition [of In Rainbows]that cost like $90.
It was a special case. It’s not like all of sudden everybody’s records are gonna go out there and they’ll all be pay-what-you-will. But it’s indicative of the fact that the music industry is in a period of huge upheaval. There’s no doubt, especially with what it costs to make a CD, that the record labels got way greedy and started selling stuff more expensively than they should have. It was all about grabbing every dollar that you could. And that kind of ruined things for a long period, in a way.
You think so?
I mean, a CD costs like a dollar to make, and CDs were selling for $18.99 in stores when they could’ve been $10.99. The internet has definitely helped to put some big nails in that. So what Radiohead did was just a big factor of that.
Right now albums on iTunes are 10 bucks. And that seems like a reasonable price to pay for a record. I don’t have any problem paying 10 dollars for any album that I would want to buy, or own. I think now’s a time for rebalancing some of the unfair proportions that were going on.
How do you feel about fans downloading the new Sonic Youth album?
Well, that’s a big issue at the moment — and it’s not an easy issue to address. I download music all the time. And there’s so much music out there at this point.
Basically for me, I use the internet like a radio station. And where we live, there aren’t really good radio stations anymore. You read about so much more than you actually hear, so if I read about something that’s intriguing I will download it. But anything I like and feel is going to be meaningful to me — something I’m going to want to play more than once or twice — I go out and buy it. And that’s just the way I feel. I like to have the hard object with all the info and the pictures and everything. And I don’t like to buy albums digitally, because I don’t find it very satisfying. I like to have a hard copy of the record that I care about.
I mean there’s plenty of people who just go out and steal music. And it’s hard as an artist to figure out right now how to get your album heard. I mean, you want people to hear the music. And yet you want artists to be able to support themselves off their work because that’s important. We’re still in a state where the industry hasn’t found its equilibrium yet. For us, no matter how many people steal our music on the internet, they can’t find on the internet the excitement and presence of a live concert. So bands go out and tour.
Recorded music is just that — it’s recorded music. It’s like a snapshot of something in a way. So yeah, you can find it our album on the internet. But you can’t find the experience of going to a concert live, and that’s become much more critical for a lot of performing artists. So maybe the balance shifts in that regard as well. Bands will make more of their money touring than they do off records. You know it’s kind of hard to say since it’s not all sorted out at this point.
Yeah, although it’s really hard to make money touring if you’re a new band.
I guess it is. But even from the days when we were little nothings we figured out how to make money touring. Maybe it’s a work ethic. It’s not like in our early days we were charging exorbitant prices; we were just working really hard, but we’d come home from tour with enough money to live on for a few months. And figure out scrappy ways to exist until the next tour happened. I don’t know, I guess it’s hard. It can be hard if you don’t have people coming to your show!
Exactly.
That definitely puts a damper on things, but I don’t know. That’s called paying your dues, I guess.
Finally, just a quick question about one of your songs on The Eternal, “What We Know.” Is that a track about the ineffability of what comes next for Sonic Youth? Or what comes next for the people in the band?
I think it was more about trying to look at relationships, whether it be a personal relationship or a band-to-audience relationship, or whatever relationship you want to make it. And just the different ways a relationship is looked at. Like, the first verse says, “This is my vision of it, this is what I know,” and the second verse is “your vision” — the other party’s — and the third one is like where you meet, “this is what we know.”
Whenever you’re in any kind of relationship, whether it be performer-audience or a love relationship, or even a band relationship, there’s always the different perspectives on the way a situation is. And everybody’s piecing it a little differently. So it’s just kind of an observation about that.
Sonic Youth play Massey Hall (178 Victoria) Tuesday, June 30. Tickets still available: $36.50-$48.50 from Ticketmaster.