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

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.

Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.

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.

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.

Every band runs its course.

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

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

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

Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn't matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone's ideas get contributed to it.

I've always been an acoustic guitar player, and I've pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

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

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.

'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

I guess I see 'Goo' half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.

Signing to a major, there weren't many bands from our sphere that were doing it. I mean, obviously R.E.M. had done it, and Husker Du and the Replacements had done it, and maybe Soul Asylum, but that was probably about it. Those four bands were pretty much the only ones from that milieu that had signed to a major.

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.

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.

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.

One thing I always loved about vinyl was the length of a side, around 20 or 22 minutes. That's the perfect length of an attention span for listening time, you know? You could listen and give it all your attention. Put on something that's 70 minutes, and nobody's sticking around past the first 20 or 30 minutes.

I read a lot of science fiction, and it's ingrained, in a certain way, and I've been very involved with Kerouac and the Beats, but before that, it was a lot of science fiction.

Bands rise and surface in the British press so regularly that, for the most part, unless something really catches my ear, I feel like, 'Oh, if they're still around in two years, I'll see what they're up to.'