Sonic Youth
'Nursed' Back To Health
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NATN: Murray Street was born out of your acoustic tracks. What are the origins of these pieces?
Thuston Moore: Well, this one is not too dissimilar. I mean, when we were getting ready to do this record, again I was in the process of trying to amass some material for some forthcoming solo jolt. But I delivered maybe half of the songs to the band, and said, well, let's try these for starters. They were already sort of structured and had lyrics. So we did that, and it's great. I always really like doing it because each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It's always so great for me. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song. In fact, I sometimes forget which ones were.
NATN: Well, can you run down which is which?
TM: I brought in "Pattern Recognition," the first song. I was singing on it. People really liked the song but they really hated the way I was singing, or the lyrics. The name of the song at the beginning was "It's The Mayhem." The chorus was, "it's the mayhem," but they thought I was singing "Instant Mayhem." That is the name of Don Fleming's publishing company, so they thought I was singing about Don Fleming's publishing company [laughs]. And I was like, no, no, "it's the mayhem!" They took the wind out the lyrical bounty I had. So I said, well, look, maybe Kim should sing it. We always try to encourage more songs sung by Kim, because there are always requests for it. I certainly don't want to ball hog all the singing, that's for sure. So Kim sang it in a completely different style. It's interesting because there's a certain rhythmic thing happening on the choruses that was very dictated by what I have, but she is just singing across it. There's a weird meter change but she is offering a different rhythmic idea. At first I was really anal about it but I realized it came out really nice.
"Unmade Bed" is something I brought in fairly complete. "Dripping Dream" is something I brought in. The middle sections, when we go into instrumental territories, are really re-worked. They're certainly notated and composed by me. The middle of "Dripping Dream" took us extensive hours to figure out. "Mariah Carey And The Arthur Doyle Handcream" we wrote on spec for a split single with Erase Errata. It was an A/B kind of song idea I had and we sat around, for the first time ever, and wrote lyrics all together, trading lines. It was at the time when Mariah was sort of having issues. We had some Star magazines lying around and decided to write about that. Kim was interested in her as this Marilyn Monroe-type of woman who was coming across with an innocent demeanor, but also like, oops, am I seducing you? At the same time, some magazine had asked Kim who her favorite diva in America was, and she said Arthur Doyle. He is this elderly, free-jazz musician from Alabama. He must have seen this, and that Christmas he sent us a gift with no note or anything, and it was a tube of Nivea hand cream. The song was trying to straddle these two things and put them together. It's called "Kim Gordon" now, because Geffen legal said Mariah would maybe not like it, although there's no denigration in the song at all, just different little viewpoints.
"Stones" I wrote. A lot of the things that go on in the middle and end were Sonic Youth-ized. Lyrically, I don't know what I was going for there... using surrealistic wordplay that evoked something that had to do with rock'n'roll life. "Pattern Recognition" was based on Kim's reading of William Gibson's novel. It is about a young woman in the near future who was a "cool hunter." They're hired by corporations to go out to the streets and figure out the future of coolness to commodify it. "Unmade Bed" is an unusual song for us, because the lyrics were more story-telling in like a Lee Hazlewood style. I thought it would give it a certain strength. "Dripping Dream" is a completely weirded-out morphing of a record collector into the actual material he's collecting [laughs]. "Dude Ranch Nurse" was written in the studio. Kim wrote it when we were working on ideas for the cover and we came across Richard Prince's "nurse" paintings. We've known him since the '70s as an artist in downtown New York. All the paintings has different titles, like "Washington Nurse" and "New England Nurse," and we were actually going to call the record "Dude Ranch Nurse." I thought it was completely absurd. But then it was brought to our attention that Blink-182 had an album called "Dude Ranch," and an album cover with a porn star in a nurse outfit. We didn't want to confuse everybody [laughs].
While we were doing that, Kim wrote the lyrics inspired by the paintings. "New Hampshire" is a song I brought in, written about.. sort of a sentimental thing after reading the oral history of Aerosmith. I grew up in the early '70s in New England, and this book was the first one I'd read to really capture what life was like up there during that time. Being in bands and trying to do something and driving down to New York.. that kind of lifestyle. At the same time, I'd gone to see this blues event at Madison Square Garden that Martin Scorsese did. [Aerosmith members] Steven [Tyler] and Joe [Perry] came out. It was a really genuine thing for these guys. After all the bullshit of fame, drugs and all this stuff, it came down to them being so happy to be in the same place as B.B. King. That really struck me. The song was basically noting certain things happening at this show.
"Paper Cup Exit" was a riff idea I brought in but the band turned it into a full-blown song. Lee wrote the lyrics. "I Love You Golden Blue" was written in the studio by all of us. She sang it in this French chanteuse kind of way. She nailed it. I like that song a lot. Vincent Gallo said he was doing a short film to it, or so he says. "Peace Attack" I had been playing solo for awhile. It probably was the first song I brought to the band, and we had been playing it since last summer, when we did some songs with Wilco.
NATN: Weren't you playing the "Arthur Doyle" song too?
TM: Yeah, because that had already come out as a seven-inch. "Peace Attack" came from a book I did with three other poets, where each day in February 2003 we had to write stanzas documenting our month. It was published in Cleveland by Slow Toe. We live in Northampton, Mass., so I'm able to take walks along this pond that is part of Smith College. It's the Sylvia Plath pond so she sort of enters my body while I'm walking around [laughs]. It was at the time when war [in Iraq] was being declared and I was just surrounded by nature and trying to come to terms with this blissful nature versus the inhumane mentality of war. People were being deluded by someone using the word "peace" like a McDonald's hamburger.. we're going after "the peace."
NATN: The album definitely seems to be of a piece, musically with Murray Street. Can you discuss why the band seems to be reveling in this more understated sound of late?
TM: I don't know! This album is a little shaggier or rockier. I think there's a bit more blasting energy going on, but it still has that cerebral quality. It's just our own adulthood. Not that it means anything as far as wanting to rock out, but I don't know. To us, it's getting more involved with traditional songwriting. That, to us, is where the experimental nature comes in. We're all involved with so much outside activity with really hardcore, radical experimental musicmaking, so trying to employ more traditional techniques is, to us, more experimental. I have to reign myself in a lot. My favorite record last year was the Lightning Bolt record. There's something going on that is really astounding. To me, I'd love to do a record that works on that level, but we're not going to do that. And we're certainly not going to do that and deliver it to a label like DGC. We'd just do it ourselves on SYR and we sort of do a little bit here and there.
Songwriting, in the sense we've been doing since Murray Street, is us developing our craft as a fivesome, with Jim O'Rourke involved. On the last one, I was bringing in concepts, and that does dictate a certain quality. It's a little bit of a paradox, because I find it a little too safety net-ish. I think we should just super-group compose a record. But I really don't think it matters too much. As long as we all feel really good about each song, we're okay. As long as we feel good about it, that to me is sort of the only thing I can answer to. We run things by people here and there, but not very many [laughs].
NATN: How has Jim's role evolved? He seems to be particularly evident on the end of "Dripping Dream."
TM: He's definitely integral. We're all very sensitive that Jim has the shortest history with the band, and he knows that, too. He wants to be somewhat of a free agent. We'd always entertained the notion of having a musician come into the band, but we could never think of anyone who could, since we'd become such a nucleus. When he came in, he was working with us in a technical aspect. Musically, he came in with some ideas for bass guitar, because we weren't playing bass for a couple of years there. Kim had decided to play third guitar. So then, we had to take Jim on the road so he could play bass, and that expanded his musical involvement. He prioritizes Sonic Youth, which is interesting. I don't wholly expect it but he does it anyway. I'm just going to let time dictate how Jim's future evolves.
He is so involved in his own work. We all are, but I think he has two hours a night where he can maybe sleep. He came into the band at an interesting period. We'd been playing together for 20-plus years. A certain kind of distinctive sophistication had developed. It wasn't traditional at all. We've been going through old material with these reissues. Listening to these tapes, it seemed very crude to me. We're a good decade past that and I just feel like there's no way I'd ever want to play like that again. It was kind of ham-fisted. He came in at that point as a musician who really knows his shit, but he's able to work on a level where he can take himself away from that. With "Mariah," we had Jim remix it. It was really heavy and hardcore. It sounded amazing. But something about it was lacking from the single version, which we ultimately went with. What about the cheapo version did we go for? It was more garage. When Jim remixed it, he took it into this Melvins/White House kind of thing. Garage rock is a culture he's never really been a part of. It's not his style or expertise to do rough and loose garage punk.
NATN: Is Jim working on another solo album?
TM: I think he is, actually. I have heard nothing. I'm curious myself but I think there's something going on there.
NATN: Can you talk about some of the motivating factors for doing Lollapalooza again?
TM: When it first came up, it was like, well, you guys won't want to do this, will you? We had wanted to a fairly large theater tour, with like Flaming Lips, Le Tigre and Wolf Eyes. Our booking agent is [Lollapalooza co-founder] Marc Geiger. He was going to put this together, but he was like, we're doing Lollapalooza and the Lips are going to do it. So I thought, let's do what we always do, which is a hot-rockin' theater tour across America. But then I asked, can we do it? He said, you guys would want to? To me, it's a really easy thing to plug into. It's no muss, no fuss. You play to 20 times as many people as you'd ever be playing to. I can bring my 10-year-old. It will be fun. The money is good, and then Morrissey is headlining. That's perverse, going on before Morrissey!
NATN: Can I request "Saucer-Like" again?
TM: I'd like to do "Saucer-Like," actually. I think we may have attempted learning that. Before NYC Ghosts & Flowers when all of our equipment got ripped off, a lot of those guitars dictated how things sounded, and they're gone. Replicating that has been a little hit and miss.
NATN: What can you tell me about the upcoming Goo reissue?
TM: I always kind of discounted Goo and thought Dirty represented more what we were going for at that point. In retrospect, listening to Dirty, especially in reissue form, it leaves me a bit spent. Some of it a like a lot, but it wears itself really hard on its shoulder. But I have a completely renewed interest in Goo now and I'm really excited. Goo [will include] an eight-track demo. That will be part of the package. There's a few B-side things that came out here and there, especially in Europe.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"