We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.
We're not playing your typical guitar tuning, so there is no normal chords for us to get our footing with. We're pretty much making it up as we go as far as the sounds we're creating. Oftentimes, the song will be inspired by just a certain kind of block of sound that somebody creates.
Every band runs its course.
I gravitated to New York City in the late '70s to pursue a career in visual art, which is what I trained in at university.
Being someone who plays gigs and finding many, many memorable ones in different ways, I guess I'd have to say I don't really have a single favourite one that I could pick out.
I recognise that the whole issue of downloading and intellectual property rights is not an easy one, but on the whole, I'm a fan of downloading, both legal and illegal, and the open-source ethos that it harbours for the future is a good one.
As a rock fan, you read of the big labels and the multinationals and the big tours with road crews and semi-trailers full of gear, and playing stadiums. In the '90s, that's what we did.
Change is always good. It brings you to a new place.
Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.
We'll go in one direction with one album, and then we like to do the opposite right away. But it's not like we ever have an idea before we start - that would be too artificial. It all starts from just sitting in a room and playing.
I don't know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.
As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.
We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.
Probably the most fun thing we do in our lives is getting up on stage.
One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.
I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.
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.
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.
Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.
