We were never the cool band to like. They tried to put us into a hair-metal thing, but we weren't really Warrant or Poison. We were always outside the box. I think we had a little niche that nobody had - maybe the funkiness had something to do with it.
We're a staple in the American music culture. Like us or not, we're here to stay.
I don't see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear 'pop,' you're like, 'Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,' and I feel like, 'Uh-uh. That's not me.'
Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.
The style of music that we're playing, this progressive metal style, has always been an upstream battle for us. We don't usually get a lot of commercial exposure.
I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.
We had an extreme reaction to Storm Corrosion. We were proud of it, but it divided the audience. The metal fans were divided. Some went with it. Some hated it, since it wasn't the progressive metal supergroup they were waiting for.
When I was 18, the vision was to make music that didn't exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory.
'Shell Shocked' is so different from what people are used to hearing from Ty Dolla Sign.
Sonically, musicians always go above and beyond in our efforts to disrupt radio. It's always about being different. Our radio is never conventional anyway.
The only way I'm comfortable with a new album is if I'm taking a new risk.
When I heard Flying Lotus, I was like, 'Wow, okay, everything can be off the grid.'
I wasn't Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson. I wasn't Tori Amos or Norah Jones. Nobody knew what to do with me.
For me, I always have looked at 'indie' as a term of 'independence.' Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant 'popular' to me; you know, it didn't define a sound.
My music was never considered cool, but I've always felt that connection with the audience.
A lot of the songs are very rock-oriented. My voice makes them country, and a lot of people think that is a strange combination... I think it creates something different and unique.
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 think we're quite unique in that we do have our own sound and approach and we don't really care what's going on elsewhere... we've never wanted to be part of another trend or movement.
I have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me.
I'm not a mass-appeal artist.
At the end of the day, I would like to have the farthest reach in terms of being able to communicate to as many people as possible. So it's not that I enjoy being obscure; it's that I sonically don't want to be situated here or there.
Our band was different. We were still playing rock 'n' roll, but we had an entirely different sound: just one guitar, but an organ and a saxophone.
I think that's one of the biggest problems in rock is people thinking too much, putting too much emphasis on getting things perfect or completely sorted out. Sometimes that sound of not having everything sorted out is kind of cool.
I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.
I'm never scared what people are gonna think about music that I make.
