Lee Ranaldo Talks Occupy Wall Street, Sonic Youth, And His New Solo Album

What were some of the ideas that went into the making of this album? I think basically, for me, I really wanted this record to reflect where I've been at the last year or two and to be fairly personal. It's the type of record I wanted to make for a really long time, and for one reason or another it never happened until now, and when it did happen, now, it happened in a very natural and organic way. I really didn't go into it with a lot of preconceived notions even as far as what I wanted it to be, I mean I just started writing these songs and was trying to make a record that was all my songs and all me singing. My expectations of it didn't go too far beyond that.

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. For this record, I really wanted, to some degree, to pay homage to the kind of records by singer/songwriters from the present and the past that I have really valued and enjoyed, where it really feels like it's a record coming from one person's point of view and it opens up a little window into their thoughts and emotions and things like that. These songs started popping out and I really just started collecting them and working on them.

You said at the beginning there that you're trying to express where you've been at in the past year or two. How would you describe that? These songs all started on acoustic guitar. I've kind of always been an acoustic guitar player and always written songs and I never had the right occasion to take a batch of stuff I'd worked on and finish it before. For this record I really didn't want to go back to work tapes from the past 10 or 20 years and pull out what I thought were the gems. I was really kind of working in the moment on all this stuff. It was stuff that was popping out just by sitting around and playing the guitar in a very casual way.

And I guess the fact that over the last few years Sonic Youth hasn't been working very much, by our own choice, we were all working on our own projects. That led to a few different things in my mind. For one thing, I was working on a lot of other things that were quite fulfilling for me, really working on some wonderful stuff in the last few years, but, not working on songs. You know, working in much more abstract or experimental ways or visual art, or whatever. And I, to some degree, I missed that work that goes into making songs and working on songs. I think when these songs started popping out, you know the first one came while I was preparing for an acoustic show and I kind of finished it off and started the show with it a couple weeks later, and the process was so organic. When the next one popped out, I felt like, "Well, I'm going to follow this one down the same road," and I just kept following along with these songs. I was happy to be working on songs again. I guess the process was more personal, just in that I was working on my own on this stuff. It just kind of evolved.

Can we talk about the song "Shouts"? The scene it paints with the lyrics is pretty specific, it seems to me. Well, that song was based on a photo. Did the record company send you this packet with all lyrics and all that kind of stuff?

(Getty)

Yes, I see that news clipping. We wrote about that too, that sensational photo. Yeah, yeah, yeah the riot kids photo or whatever. Where are you located?

Brooklyn. Oh right, you're in New York. So I saw that photo and it really impressed me. I mean, it's got this tender moment going on in the middle of this violent scene. And no matter what the back story is on it, that's what I saw when I saw that photo. On the mundane side, it's a photo taken after a sporting event; it doesn't have the heaviness of being a politically charged riot or anything like that. But the picture just really struck me. I saw it at a time when I was getting more and more swept up in this movement that became the Occupy movement here in New York, but it started months and months before with the events in the Middle East. The Arab Spring, as they call it, and all that stuff. Just watching this movement catch fire from one Middle Eastern country to the next and then to other places around the world; to Europe and Russia and China and here.

I live just a few blocks from Zuccotti park so I was there a lot. The marchers would come past my door pretty much every day for the first month or two of the occupation down there. And I really got swept up in the whole thing. I spent a lot of time down there. I was posting tons of pictures to my blog and my Twitter and whatnot, and bringing supplies down.

And when I saw that picture, it really spoke to that whole movement for me, in a sense. One of the things I loved, or I love still about this Occupy movement is it's got a very gentle core. I mean, it's really decidedly nonviolent in the face of all kinds of situations. It mostly did not lead to any violent confrontation. And that picture, with this tender center, in the middle of a violent conflict, which I could take to stand for the world in general right now or different fucked up scenes here, there and everywhere—it just somehow made sense to me. I definitely had this image of the Occupy movement in mind when I was writing the lyrics to that song.

You know, although the center section [of the song] was collaged from things that were said by the couple in that picture, it all, in my mind, was speaking to this completely different issue: what I kind of consider the rise of a new left. Not in only our country, but, really, globally, the rise of this sort of leftist movement that in a lot of ways is very pure in its ideals and very... I don't know, Utopian or very ambitious in its ideals in a way that I haven't really seen since I was a young person in the '60s and '70s.

Some people who lived and worked around Zuccotti park were complaining about what had happened to the park and that they couldn't use it anymore. Were you at any point bothered by how intense it was getting down there? No, not at all. I wasn't. You know, I'm a few blocks away so, I know friends who live right on the park, who are very supportive of the movement. But even they could understand that if the drummers were drumming all day, it could get out of control for people who lived near by. But I think that, on that level, the drummers curtailed their noisy hours to a couple sessions each day or something like that. I thought that was a good concession.

Otherwise, that park, what use did it get really? Okay, so maybe some business people sat in there and ate their lunches, you know. That seems a small price to pay; the loss of that for this inspirational movement. I mean, I really thought most of the people that were picking concerns, on the negative side, were being fairly petty. You know, anybody I know down there, that lives right around the park, that is in support of the movement was happy to suffer inconveniences to see this thing grow and happen down there.

(Rachel Pincus/Gothamist)

I was not there the night they were evicted. I believe I was in Europe. It was rally getting dismantled at the end. I was, unfortunately, away. The cold weather was coming on. I was either in Europe or South America or somewhere and came back to find that this thing I'd left only a week or ten days before was now totally dismantled. So, I wasn't there when they were evicted. I was there for a bunch of heavy scenes both daytime and nighttime, some confrontational situations, but no, I was not there when they were evicted.

Did anybody who was participating in the protest in Zuccotti Park recognize you? I was mostly just another person standing around down there, walking around, but occasionally someone would come up and acknowledge that they knew who I was or something like that. Or, usually the marchers would come past my door everyday and I would always go down and hang out in the doorway and sort of talk to people and either take pictures or march along for a while. And, you know, some people in the crowd would recognize me, but it wasn't a big deal.

When you were writing these songs, did the lyrics come first or the music? Music, for sure, came first, in pretty much every instance. I really developed most of them on acoustic guitar. And I was really just working on developing a coherent set of cord changes that seem to work in some way for me. I mean, occasionally, a few lines of a chorus would come almost simultaneously, but mostly I deferred working on the lyrics until I really felt like I had a good solid structure from beginning to end and something that was going to merit the time it really takes to put lyrics over.

Between The Times & The Tides' cover photo

It's a line of lyrics in the song "Xtina As I Knew Her." Right from the beginning, when it looked like I was getting an album together, that line popped out at me. I think the first bunch of people I tried it out on didn't respond to it very well. So I went through these motions of coming up with all these other possible titles and trying them all out and in the end, feeling like, no, I really gotta go back to what my heart or head or intuition told me to being with. In a lot of ways, that's how this record worked, it really was about following my first thoughts and not letting any kind of critical notions intervene, just kind of, like, following the first thing that I thought to do in every case and really keeping it in a certain kind of purity.

Similar thing with the album cover. You know, that cover picture was taken of me from a whole different context. I was doing an interview with these Canadians about this Canadian avant garde band, and the photographer snapped that shot and I looked at it, and this was sort of in September of 2010, I only had a couple songs going at that point, but I just thought, "Wow, this would be a great album cover, if I ever actually get these songs together, I'm going to use this picture." Seeing the picture almost, kind of, motivated me to work more on the songs because I felt like I had a possible album cover. But when I showed that picture to certain people, they were like, "Oh, you should find another picture, this one's not that great," and yet, I kept coming back to it and just being like, "This is the right picture for some reason." I just tried to follow my instincts.

Can we talk a little about this book, Ground Zero: New Yorkers Respond? What was your contribution to it? It's not a very widely seen book. I participated in it because some people I know were putting it together and they'd asked me if I would contribute something. I think they'd probably read my piece which is called Paper Box. I've used that piece in a few different ways. My wife, Leah Singer and I had this long standing performance called Drift, which was kind of abstract film and spoken word and music and that text was part of an hour long performance piece.

I live right near ground zero and was completely swept up in all of the events of that day. I mean, we were here. In the house, we had two little kids at the time, and we were evacuated for weeks and then lived through Lower Manhattan as a sort of war zone, which turned into a construction site for the next couple of years. This affected both my home life and Sonic Youth's life because our studio is also in the 'red zone' as they called it, down here on Murray Street.

And, so, we were intimately involved in everything. I wrote that piece, it's about that day and those days and yet it's not very specific. It doesn't really talk about towers falling or anything like that, but it's impressions of what life was like down here in that period—the way I saw it. For instance, the day we were evacuated, just seeing on different street corners, all these piles of dusty shoes and wondering why there were all these piles of empty shoes on the corners. It seems very symbolic in a certain way and very metaphoric or poetic or something. I don't know, I just jotted all that stuff down and eventually assembled it in that piece, called Paper Box. It seemed to really resonate with a lot of people and I really felt like it was a strong piece. So, we utilized it in a few different ways.

Have you been to the 9/11 memorial yet? And how do you feel about what's been done at that entire site? I have not been to the memorial yet. We keep meaning to. You know, you have to buy tickets months in advance, and we keep meaning to buy them so we'll get down there at some point, but we have not been to the memorial proper. But living in the neighborhood, it kind of feels, partly, like being part of a living memorial all the time. The tourists were flocking down here and, especially when Occupy Wall Street was happening it was like, the tourists who came to see the World Trade Center would make a detour, a block or two and walk by Zuccotti Park and kind of got two for one for their money.

It's slightly turning the area into this tourist attraction in a way that it never was when it was just the World Trade Center site. I understand it, this neighborhood, down here, has seen such transformations in the 30 years that I've lived here that it's just the next phase in a way. I have nothing against change or evolution, and I'm not one of those people who wants the city to be what it was 40 years ago or whatever, because that's not what New York is really. I don't know, it's just something else to deal with as you're trying to live a normal life down here. It's kind of like this: we who lived through it don't necessarily need daily reminders of what happened back then because there is no way we can forget it. Yet now we're part of this larger historical context.

I was in the East Village on 9/11, and I can imagine it must be really heavy living down there, to this day. Yeah, I mean, it is, especially since this is pretty much the neighborhood I've lived in since I really landed on my feet in New York in 1980. So I've seen a lot of the evolution down here, but for me it's really just my neighborhood, it's where I've raised my kids and lived my adult life. It's constantly been transforming, but this has definitely been the strangest part of the transformation. And yet, it is still my neighborhood. The cover picture is my neighborhood; it's two blocks away in that artwork. So it's a very valuable thing to me to feel that way: that this is still a place that I am happy to call my home.

I know we have to wrap this up but, are you going to be touring to play the songs on the new album? Yeah, we are, we're gonna go out. I've got a band together, made up of guys on the record, Steve Shelley on drums, Alan Licht on guitar, Irwin Menken on base. You know, we're starting pretty humbly. We've only played three shows so far. We played a couple in Brooklyn and we played one out at Maxwell's. We're going out, we're doing a couple weeks in support of this guy, Matt Ward. Kind of, humbly, we're the opening act. We're doing a tour of Europe and some other headlining dates in the country here.

I feel like it's a new record, in a way, as a solo artist, I'm a new artist and it's a strange climate to be going out and trying to make it, hitting the road with a new band these days, it's very difficult, economically and on a lot of different levels. I feel like the music is strong and we definitely want to go out and present it and see what happens. The stream of songwriting that led to this record has not abated, so I've got 6 or 8 new songs I'm working on and it's kind of like a tap opened or something.

Do you have anything to say to Sonic Youth fans about the future of the band and whether there's going to be more shows, more music or albums or anything? I guess all I have to say is, we're on hiatus and that's all we're saying. We're all talking, but we're not really talking about the future of the band right now. I mean, obviously Thurston and Kim are going through troubled times and trying to sort that out, and that might take a while to sort out. It's hard to predict what the future will be in terms of new performances or new recordings, new music.

But we've had an amazing 30 year run, that's got to be said no matter what happens in the future. There are so many ways in which we'll stay tied to each other for the future. There are three or four archival projects in the works right now that are still being worked on. We've got a massive archive that we've spent the past three or four years upgrading and digitizing and kind of preserving. We definitely want to release historical items out of that archive, other things like that for the future. You know, it really remains to be seen.

Right now, I guess I should point out in case it's not clear, that this record was made before any of these revelations about their troubled times came to light, even to us within the band. I made this record in the pure vacuum—Sonic Youth was on down time and I was working on some other projects, making these songs. I'm pretty happy about that. I don't think I could have made this record under the pressure of feeling like, "Oh, my band's gonna quit working for an extended period of time, I better come out with a solo record or something like that." I really hope that people don't see it in that light because it's not been the case at all. For me, it's a good period to have had this happen because I've got the time to focus on it.

Obviously Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years and I love all those guys dearly. Mainly, right now I just kind of wish the best for Thurston and for Kim, that they sort their situation out and find their place back to happiness. The band is kind of secondary to that at the moment. There will be Sonic Youth activity of one sort or another down the pike in one way or another.