Pitchfork

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore is one of the coolest dudes alive. He's heard everything, he knows everyone, and there's simply no getting around the fact that he's been an expert witness to just about every major movement in rock music throughout the past thirty years. And rather than rest on his body of work, Thurston continues to push boundaries, continuing to put out great albums with Sonic Youth, engage in various side gigs, and run his record label, Ecstatic Peace.

Moore has a busy summer ahead, and not only due to an expansive tour peppered with performances of Sonic Youth's 1988 classic Daydream Nation (including one such run-through at our Pitchfork Music Festival). He's also getting ready for the September 18 release of a solo album on Ecstatic Peace, titled Trees Outside the Academy. (The album's tracklist can be found at the end of this story).

Last week, we phoned Moore to talk about Daydream and Trees. We ended up chatting about his plans for collaboration with Yoko Ono at our festival, a teenage afternoon spent dropping stuff, and, um, that Starbucks thing. Here's the interview, in full.

And as a bonus, check out a behind-the-scenes video of the creation of Trees Outside the Academy by clicking on the link below. It features the songs "Never Light" and "The Shape Is in a Trance", as well as footage of Thurston getting his hair cut!

Pitchfork: I understand you're coming off a late night in the studio.

Thurston Moore: Yeah, we were recording an unreleased Bob Dylan song. Sonic Youth was doing it. We were gonna hand it over to Todd Haynes, who's doing that Bob Dylan meta-bio, and see if he wants to do anything with it. Todd is an old friend of ours, he's worked with us before, so he asked us if he wanted to cover this one unreleased tune which actually is the title of the film, I believe. "I'm Not There".

Pitchfork: You're putting the last touches on a new solo album. What can you tell us about it?

Thurston Moore: I'm always thinking about doing a solo joint. I actually sort of did it in the 90s; I did this thing called Psychic Hearts, basically a record based around the real skeletal song structure or idea. Usually what I compose on my own I'll bring into Sonic Youth and we'll turn it into a Sonic Youth song. Which is always, to me, the most successful, because it becomes something more than what it originally was. It just becomes this Sonic Youth thing, and I love that. But I also always have this desire to not do something with such a democratic concern, where I just call the shots. So I always want to do that, but I usually never get a chance to; usually when I'm gearing up and songs start happening, I'm kind of collecting songs and trying to remember them. Then, all of a sudden, it starts becoming time for Sonic Youth to record, and it's like "Oh man, I just happened to have these kind of tunes." And I'll sort of throw them into the studio, and they become Sonic Youth songs. Which, again, is fucking great for me, because they manifest themselves in a way that I find really magical; but another year goes by where it's like "Huh, I never really got to do that solo record" [laughs].

Pitchfork: The fates must have aligned this time. Have you settled on a title?

Thurston Moore: I think I'm going to call it heer kum th' language meanies, and it's going to be spelled kind of all weird, but I mean, you can spell it however you want. There's one song on the record that has that line in it, "Here come the language meanies." I'm sort of an archivist of post-war poetry; mimeo poetry and journals and stuff. And I've been involved with that for years. One of my heroes in that scene is the late Ted Berrigan, one of the most significant poets of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, like, the second, third generation school in New York, after Frank O'Hara and that gang, and after Alan Ginsberg and that gang. He was a really interesting dude; he was all about taking the common language of the home and the street and really bringing it into contemporary poetry. He was sort of rejecting language poetry, which is much more academic, and kind of this art object, and it comes very devoid of any kind of emotion. Or, you know, it takes itself away from the human condition, where it becomes object-oriented. I don't know if that's really a valid interpretation of what language poets were up to, but it was just a much stiffer exercise than, say, what people like Ted Berrigan represented.

Anyway, I was reading an interview with Berrigan back in the day, and they were asking him about the scene, and he says, "Oh, you've got to be careful of those language meanies," which I thought was a great way of dealing with another discipline. I like the idea of language meanies, and how people sort of look at your work and how you express it and how judgmental they are about it, and how it doesn't really mean anything in the long run.

Pitchfork: Think the title will stick?

Thurston Moore: It might change, but I don't think it will. I haven't gotten the thumbs-up from everybody about it yet. I think [Sonic Youth bassist/Moore's wife] Kim [Gordon] was a little on the fence about it. She told me I was being a little too off-putting, maybe. Hopefully it sounds intriguing enough in a weird way.

[Ed: We guess Kim got her way, because in between the time this interview was conducted and the time it was published, the album title was changed to Trees Outside the Academy!]

Pitchfork: You've had some great help with the record: Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis...

Thurston Moore: I live up in Northampton, Massachusetts, and it just so happens that Mascis lives in the next town over. He has a studio in his top floor that he lives on. And John Agnello, who worked with us on Rather Ripped as our mixer, works with J all the time. So I basically just asked J if I could use his studio, and he said [in Mascis' mumble] "Yeah sure." I asked John if he would be available, and he said "Yeah sure" and I sort of brought up a few musicians to play with. I had all these different ideas, and for most of them it wasn't what I planned on doing, but it turned out fine; I mean I wasn't really drawing a hard line on what I wanted to do.

But, basically, it came down to working with Steve Shelley, and this woman Samara Lubelski. She's a violinist and bass player from Brooklyn who's done some solo records under her own name, and she was in this band Hall of Fame that did some pretty cool underground records. So I called her up and asked her if she would play violin on some of these songs. I kept thinking "Well, I'll do guitar, bass, drums and instead of second guitar I'll have some strings," because I just sort of had it in my mind how that would sound. And I thought she would be the person to bounce the ideas off. So we got together to rehearse, and me and her and Steve got the songs together, and then went up to J's and recorded them with Agnello. We just did it. And I played bass guitar, and I did all the guitar overdubs.

Luckily Mascis was around the house; he wasn't on tour, and so every once in a while with one of the songs I would hear something where we really just needed some shredding lead, and I would go downstairs and find him, and he'd be, like, "Yeah, okay...I'll be up in a second." And he'd come up and plug his guitar in, and sit on the couch, really slouched down. So we asked him, "Do you want to hear the song and sort of work on it for a while" and he was like, "No, it's okay, just play me the section" [laughs]. And I was like, "Why don't I play you the song?" and so I'd play it and he'd just rip all through the whole song. And I'd say, "Okay, here comes he section" and I would count it in, and he would really rip on the section, as if he wrote the goddamned thing. I mean, it was the most harmonically, melodically astounding lead guitar throw-downs. So I had him do that on three or four turns, and it was really sweet. That's a real bonus on this record.

Pitchfork: That's a privileged position to be in, having Mascis around to tear it up.

Thurston Moore: Every once in a while you get some really sick Mascis action, which is pretty nice. And then, this woman who I really admire, Christina Carter from this duo called Charalambides; she's a beautiful, pure-toned vocalist and great improviser. Just a really interesting musician. I've known her for years; in fact, she's sort of lived at mine and Kim's house for a few years between tours. Luckily she was around, and I had her come in, and she sang two songs with me. So that sounds really sweet. John Moloney of Sunburned Hand of Man plays drums on one of the songs, and that's cool [laughs]. Well, this is really sort of the New England weird music scene.

Pitchfork: Have you settled on any song titles?

Thurston Moore: Yeah, I know most of the titles. There's a song called "frozen gtr," which is this song that Christina sings on and Mascis plays on. There's a song called "never lght," and there's a song called "free noise among friends" [laughs]. And a song called "thurston@13"; I found a cassette recording of myself at 13 years old, where I was doing this kind of fucked up skit for my own fun, in my lonely bedroom in Bethel, Connecticut in 1972. It's basically me dropping things on a table, recording them, and sort of describing it, like, "This is the sound of a Lysol disinfectant spray cap." And I would make the sound with the Lysol spray disinfectant cap, and I would say, "There. Now, this is the sound of a rubber band." And so I did this cassette, and I found it, and thought, "God, I was such a weird kid. What was I doing?" Anyway, I figured I should put that on the record.

Pitchfork: Besides all the household items, what can you tell me about the sound of the record?

Thurston Moore: For the most part, it's straight-up country pop. [laughs] No, it's straight up Thurston rock. Most of the tracks were done with me playing acoustic guitar. And the only real electric guitar action comes either from J or from a few overdubs I did. But, for the most part, all my playing is on acoustic guitar. In fact, there's one song I sang as a duo with Christina Carter called "Honest Jams" and it's basically acoustic guitar and vocals. It's real naked. But the other songs are full-on rock songs; there's a couple of rockers, there's a couple of instrumental pieces that are kind of like overtures-- they have these thematic ideas that run through them and they're kind of grandiose in their own way-- and then there are song-songs that are kind of formal, Sonic Youth-style songwriting. And that's probably the bulk of the record, that kind of stuff. Real meat and potatoes, Sonic Thurston tuneage.

But there's the element of strings involved, which kind of gives it a whole 'nother flavor. There's a couple snippets I'm using that are sort of noise generation pieces, but those are just small pieces that give you a break between song-songs. We're mastering it today, so we'll see; some of those ideas of dropping things in there may not even fly until we see what we have. The record's not done for another few hours.

Pitchfork: Apart from the Dylan track, are Sonic Youth up to any recording at this point?

Thurston Moore: No, no. We kind of need to record a song for this Starbucks record that's coming out.

Pitchfork: For, uh, Starbucks?!

Thurston Moore: Yeah. We sort of devised this idea of a Sonic Youth record where we asked all these different people to choose their favorite song, people like artists and actors and other musicians and what have you. So all these people, from Jeff Tweedy to Beck to Marc Jacobs to Portia de Rossi to Michelle Williams [laughs], they all chose their favorite songs and wrote a little thing about it. So it's a compilation record of artists choosing songs of Sonic Youth. There's going to be one exclusive song of ours that we'll record, so that's something we have to record.

Pitchfork: So it's going to be one of those things up at the counter along with the biscotti and the disc of Elton John's favorite Christmas songs?

Thurston Moore: [laughs] Yeah, something like that. I wish Starbucks would ask me to compile a mixtape record.

Pitchfork: That would be... interesting.

Thurston Moore: I love doing that stuff. But you know, it's so funny, because Starbucks is the new record store, right? [laughs]

Pitchfork: Yeah. I guess if you're in there buying a four dollar cup of coffee, the idea of throwing down a few more for the CD seems like no big deal.

Thurston Moore: Exactly, or getting the Paul McCartney gift card, you know. It's attractive, in a way [laughs]. I like these underground bands that only make records and stuff that they sell only at gigs, and it's only available if you go to the gig to their merch table and they advertise it on their site and at different blogs and they'll list all these things like "edition of 50, only available on this little tour we're doing." So if you're a fan you kind of got to go to get the merch.

Pitchfork: To that end, you seem to always have your ear to the underground when it comes to these low-radar, small-batch bands. How do you stay so involved in that scene?

Thurston Moore: Well, I mean, the information is out there. And that's always been a milieu that I've been part of. Sonic Youth was always part of that. Things changed through the 80s and 90s; certainly there were dynamic shifts or whatever, but in a very real way, we never left that underground activity, regardless of where we went with things. And the fact that so much of it exists now for such a watermark group, for a lot of participants in that scene, is very interesting to me. Because that's where I hang out, at basement gigs and house gigs, where new young experimental and avant garde music is being played. Even if it's experimental avant garde folk, or experimental avant garde noise, or whatever, it's all sort of this cohabitation that's going on now in that scene that I find just amazing. That's always been where I'd like to be. It resonates so much more with me.

That's not to set it up against anything else; there's a lot of above-ground music and dance that I admire, but that's generally not my stomping ground. The older I get-- I'm going to be 48-- it's a funny thing, because in one sense it's a young man's game, but in another sense it's so not ageist. I just got done playing No Fun Fest, and the majority of people there are very young, early twenties. And there was another scene with myself, and the members of Smegma, which have been around since the early 70s, and they're like complete icons to that scene. I think that people with history are so welcome in that scene. It's not about the star system or being star- struck. Although I do get the vibe, when I go to these places I've been going to for years, all these young people are thinking, "Oh my God, what is he doing here?" But that falls away really quickly. I don't think people will think I'm buying into a scene I've always been a part of.

Pitchfork: Most likely they're just shocked to see a dude of your standing hanging out in their buddy's basement.

Thurston Moore: I feel a little weird sometimes because we have such a profile. I never want to be like, "Oh my God, it's David Bowie behind the merch table!" And I never want to be in it for exploiting that scene either, for any reason. I interact with that scene musically all the time. People come over to my house all the time and we record and play in my basement. We always have these bands play with us on tour. Which is interesting, because when we play gigs, we play for at least three thousand people, they play for like fourteen people. I love putting people in that situation if they're amenable to it. Usually, it really jazzes with the audience, because it's something you won't see coming to see a band of our stature. I dig it, you know.

Pitchfork: Speaking of coming to see you, you're playing Daydream Nation all over the place this summer, and just did the first one in Barcelona, at the Primavera Sound Festival. How'd that go?

Thurston Moore: We actually got through the set without too much damage. A couple tunes were problematic, but, you know it's just the rush and war of being up on a festival stage playing material that not only you haven't played in years, but in a couple instances you never really did play [laughs]. Anyway, there were a couple songs on that record that we kind of played a couple of times, but there was really no recall at all.

While I was playing this stuff live at Primavera, I was sort of conflicted about it. I think a lot of the festival audience may not know what we're up to, and maybe if they're not familiar with Sonic Youth, they may think this is what we sound like. This is what we sounded like! Although there are certain elements there. As musicians, we've progressed quite a bit, and it felt weird. But I really enjoyed it. The context is so strange. When we wrote the material, it was like, "Let's not be afraid to stretch out on it. This will be great in the context of playing CBGBs," or something. The thought was never, "This would be great to be played at a festival in Spain or Japan, going on in between Patti Smith and Wilco."

The audience was really into it. We did an encore afterwards and did a miniature pu-pu platter of contemporary Sonic Youth. The audience responded to that. It felt so much more like, "Hey, festival, this is us."

Pitchfork: What's it like going back and thinking about music you haven't played in decades?

Thurston Moore: Daydream's from so far long ago that it was such a challenge to listen to the master tapes and figure out some of these songs. I really did not remember some of the tunings and some of the moves on the guitar. I really had to get inside myself and recall what I would've been thinking, and wondering how I would have done this. There was no standard tuning being used. There was one tuning that took us three weeks to figure out. We bounced around between Lee, myself, our guitar techs, just listening. We got to the point where we were looking at pictures of the guitars we were using at the time, and studying where my hand was on the guitar. We'd been listening to the mastertape, and it's ridiculous how crude the mastertapes are; specifically myself. Did I really accept that for myself? It sounds like I'm wearing a boxing glove on one of my hands. It sounds ratty-sounding. I would never until this day cut something so punk-sounding.

But it was the magic of the four of us doing our thing, and the songs kind of transcended whatever technology issues we had. A lot of it sounded so abstract and somewhat complicated listening to it again. Trying to figure it out, I kept backing off and had to go simpler and simpler; "I wouldn't do anything too complicated here, because I wouldn't have been doing that." There was very little move-- I'd do a little thing and there it was. Now that's it, as opposed to really belaboring it, and figuring out what weird fingering I was doing. It wasn't weird fingering, it was much more simple. That was sort of exciting, to decode myself.

Pitchfork: I guess I'm not surprised, but it sounds like you're really throwing yourself into getting this right.

Thurston Moore: We're doing it really sort of strict; we're going from "Teen Age Riot" all the way through "Eliminator Jr." That's the set. Mike Watt said-- you know, there's one song where Mike Watt calls in ["Providence"]-- he'd answer his phone if we called him from the stage, and do his spiel. Let's hope he can do that.

Pitchfork: That's incredible. Do you see Daydream as a high point-- or the high point-- in the Sonic Youth catalog? There are a lot of differing opinions about perhaps which record is second to Daydream, but that seems to be the consensus in 2007.

Thurston Moore: I think it's a good record. There are lots of different elements that make a good record; you can work on trying to make them technically great forever and still not gonna have the vibe. It's all about that. There's something to be said about the sort of here-and-now when somebody's doing something. That's where the inspirations are.

That time was really a kind of a transitional moment. We were just coming out of working in a lot of independent situations, SST Records and before that Glenn Branca's Neutral label, and then sort of flirting with bigger labels. Regardless of that, it did feel like we were taking all that we had done up to that point and making a grand gesture with it. We didn't know where we were going to go from there. There was no, "Let's do this," and then, "Let's do more of this and sign to Geffen Records and do this album." There was no plan, but we did know we wanted to break out of the limitations of a single LP. There was no CD scene at that point.

It just so happened right at that time period there were those two remarkable albums that SST had put out, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade and the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime. When Zen Arcade came out no one had done a double album in that scene. It was a complete throw down that Hüsker Dü would do this, and it was fantastic. And then the Minutemen followed suit, and it was great. And then Black Flag, who were significant to us, they would just be blowing out their songs into the ten minute realm.

For us, it was a real calling card-- we had already had that going for us, coming out of the downtown scene of extended electric guitar compositions, Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham and stuff like that. We were also coming out of the No Wave scene, which was really sort of short sharp shocks, and our songwriting was coming from so many different places: the Feelies, the Stooges, the Bush Tetras, Public Image Ltd. There was so much going on, but it was all about the song. And now it was like "Okay, it's all about the song, and what ending, and what can we expand with it." All of a sudden, it was all about expansiveness, which was kind of radical to the American punk rock formula.

Pitchfork: You're playing Daydream at our festival, so I have to ask: Is there anyone else you're looking forward to seeing at the fest?

Thurston Moore: I'm totally psyched about hearing Liquid Swords live, and I haven't seen Slint ever. Even on their reunion shows, I never got to see them. So that's cool for me. The next night, I'll be playing with Yoko Ono. I'll be playing this piece "Mulberry" that she and John had done, so I've been talking to her. I'm psyched about that.

Pitchfork: And you're off to Europe again, once you're doing mixing. You've got a busy summer before your solo record comes out in September.

Thurston Moore: I'm just real psyched to be getting it done and seeing what people think of it. A few people have heard the unmastered cuts and I'm getting good responses. Most people think I'm making some sort of off-the-wall noise record or something, but it's, like, "No, no, no, it's a total pop record."

Trees Outside the Academy:

01 frozen gtr
02 the shape is in a trance
03 honest james
04 silver>blue
05 fri/end
06 american coffin
07 wonderful witches
08 off work
09 never light
10 free noise among friends
11 trees outside the academy
12 thurston@13

Sonic Youth:

06-19 Moscow, Russia - B1 Club
06-21 Munich, Germany - Tollwood Festival ^
06-23 Neuhausen, Germany - Southside Festival
06-24 Scheessel, Germany - Hurricane Festival
06-26 Cologne, Germany - E Werk
06-27 Berlin, Germany - Columbia Halle ^
06-29 Gdynia, Poland - Open'er Festival
07-01 Cergy-Pontoise, France - Furia Sound Festival
07-03 Istres, France - La Palio
07-05 Turin, Italy - Spaziale ^
07-06 Ferrara, Italy - Piazza Castello ^
07-07 Rome, Italy - Romano di Ostia Antica ^
07-13 Chicago, IL - Union Park (Pitchfork Music Festival/ATP Don't Look Back) ^
07-19 Berkeley, CA - Berkeley Community Theater ^
07-20 Los Angeles, CA - Greek Theatre ^
07-28 Brooklyn, NY - McCarren Park Pool ^
08-15 Porto, Portugal - Paredes de Coura Festival
08-17 Saint-Malo, France - La Route du Rock Festival ^
08-19 Biddinghuizen, Netherlands - Lowlands
08-21 Glasgow, Scotland - ABC1 ^
08-22 Glasgow, Scotland - ABC 1 ^
08-25 Prague, Czech Republic - Archa Theatre
08-26 Vienna, Austria - Openair at ARENA
08-27 Zagreb, Croatia - In Music Festival
08-29 Paris, France - La Vilette Jazz Festival
08-30 London, England - Roundhouse (ATP Don't Look Back) ^
08-31 London, England - Roundhouse (ATP Don't Look Back) ^
09-01 London, England - Roundhouse (ATP Don't Look Back) ^
09-02 Stradbally, Ireland - Electric Picnic

^ performing Daydream Nation