Lee Ranaldo Quotes

Grid View List View
Quote of the Day Picture Quotes Top 100 Inspirational Quotes Top 100 Love Quotes Top 100 Happiness Quotes
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Lucy Larcom Donald Trump H. L. Mencken Yogi Berra Oscar Wilde Francis Of Assisi John Muir Khalil Gibran Aristotle
Motivational Dreams Loyalty Old School Attitude Jobs Sad Appreciation Smile Parenting
  • Musician
  • born 1956
  • 103 quotes

Lee Ranaldo, a musician (born 1956), is quoted 103 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Sonic Youth, Sonic, Solo and Youth.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

Every band runs its course.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

My solo shows require a sit-down, indoor space.

My wife's from Canada, and we're Canadian citizens.

I don't know what the vintage Sonic Youth sound is.

Change is always good. It brings you to a new place.

The Grateful Dead always had their iconography down pat.

I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.

I really liked the Jean-Luc Godard movie, 'Film Socialisme.'

The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.

Probably the most fun thing we do in our lives is getting up on stage.

I absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.

There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.

I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.

We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.

Usually my records are made trying to capture the essence of a band playing in a room.

Listening to the Beatles' music figures into pretty much all of my childhood memories.

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

We're a rock band. We're proud of it. We're not an art band, a noise band, or an extreme band.

We got our first significant pieces of press in the 'New York Rocker' from early gigs at CBGB.

One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.

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

It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.

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

We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.

Sonic Youth was a collective. There's something fantastic about the idea of making music is a social activity.

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

'Europe '72' came out right around the time that I started going to see the Dead, and it had a huge impression on me.

I ride a bicycle. I make artwork and do other kinds of stuff - but in terms of unwind, I like to play tennis and ride.

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.

Obviously, for Geffen, if it wasn't for us, it's quite possible that bands like Nirvana or Beck would not be on the label.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

It's not like we set out to antagonize the audience in any way. We're just presenting our music; it's really much more innocent.

When I first moved to New York, I was friends with a lot of dancers - people from Merce Cunningham's company and things like that.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.

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

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.

When I was in grade school and high school, I did a lot of chorale singing. And the chorus would be tenor, bass, and alto and soprano.

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.

When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was.

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.

I've always played acoustically - it's how I learned. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dylan and what have you.

What Nirvana's success means is that certain radio stations now have their ear more cocked to bands like us; they're more open to playing more stuff.

I always use the Rolling Stones as the whipping boy for this, but they still play old songs as 90% of their set, and we would die if that were the case.

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.

We always operated within a sense of community not just about the band. It's important to the way we define ourselves. It's the entire world in which we operate.

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.

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.

I always think that, for me, being someone who comes out of electric guitar experimentation, the idea of playing acoustic guitar is, in itself, kind of a radical move.

My main pedal is the Ibanez Analog Delay, the AD9 or the AD80, whichever one it is. That's my go-to pedal for short delay. I don't think I could live without that pedal.

Lee Ranaldo is quoted on

Share This Page