JPG: The final number on the album, “At
the Forks.” It’s the last number, and when I think of “forks” I think of
fork in the road, “Which way do I go?” Since Electric Trim was one type of record and this is a different type
of record…fork in the road. Do you have an idea where your next collaboration
with Raul may go or where it’s already going?
LR: I tend to think that the next things we do together are going to compound
on what we’ve learned with this record because we stretched ourselves in a
whole bunch of different directions on this record. It was an interesting
evolution because the first tracks we made started from acoustic guitar and
digital machines. A little bit later, we started recording more percussive
things — marimbas and these old gamelan instruments that Sonic Youth had
dragged back from Indonesia in the ’90s — and this old, weird cassette machine
that I used to perform with 20 years ago, this crazy modified cassette machine
that you can speed up and slow down the tapes and play them forwards and
backwards and all this crazy stuff. And we started bringing in these old real
analog elements, like these hissy cassette tapes.
By the time we were done, we had really
tried a whole bunch of new avenues. The songs on this record represent a whole
bunch of different new avenues that we could potentially explore further and I
would think the next batch of songs that we make, whether it’s an album or just
the next two to four tracks, are gonna to expand on the stuff we created with
this record.
It’s funny about that track “At the Forks” because it’s one of the first
ones we created. And it is kind of cool that it got these connotations that you
just brought up, that it’s the last track on the record and, yeah, there’s a
sense of you’re at a fork in the road or something like that, but it has a
slightly more innocent genesis which is that the forks…the song “Names of
North End Women” is about this place in Winnipeg in Central Canada in
Manitoba, my wife’s hometown, and the Forks is another place there where the
two big rivers in town meet and it’s a gathering place for the population, a
place where you go skating on the river in the winter time and there’s an
indoor shopping center there with all these cool shops and things.
So, it was built around another place in
Winnipeg but it does represent what you were saying in terms of we’ve
just created this record that has this whole new set of directions to it and
you get to the last song and, and maybe there’s this sense of possibilities in
front of us and having to choose something. That’s an interesting
interpretation of it that I like a lot.
JPG: Well, you’re welcome. Consider
yourself lucky because I’m normally horrible at interpreting poems and lyrics
and symbols.
LR: (laughs) There were a bunch of circular arcs on this record. The first song
and the last song were the first songs we created. They’re both built on the
same small little guitar riff used in different ways in each of those songs.
There’s already this circular thing happening between the first song and the
last song. I don’t even think we realized it when we sequenced the record, and
somebody pointed out to me the other day that they both share a lyrical line
about a road to nowhere. So, you start with the very first song, one of the
very first lines is something about a road to nowhere and then the last one
brings this line back as part of the lyrics. There’s a sense of we’re playing
around with a lot of elements and using them in different ways on all these
songs. Maybe it’s kind of a spiraling sense of some ideas that we’re going to
work further with as we continue.
JPG: That’s pretty cool that it
subconsciously worked out like that. Musically, because of all the progressive
percussive instruments used that there were moments such as the title track and
“Light Years Out” that reminded me of work by like Mickey Hart or Peter
Gabriel around the time of his album Security.
LR: Sure, sure. Obviously, Mickey’s stuff is super percussion heavy and he gets
into a lot of different spaces that way. The Peter Gabriel stuff was
challenging conventions of what music could be at that moment in time. That’s
really what we wanted to do with this record. We wanted to free ourselves from
whatever hats people thought we wore and try some different stuff. We knew that
percussive stuff and vocals were going to be two of the centerpieces that we
wanted to work on with this record. We really wanted to, like I said before, to
introduce the vocals earlier and to really center a lot of the tracks around
the vocal work. Partly for me over the last few records, the vocals have been
coming more to the front in terms of something that I’m really interested in
working on.
For the last couple of years, I kept saying I’m someone who was a guitarist who
also sang to now being someone who’s a singer who also plays guitar. That’s
been the shift a little bit, the vocals and the lyrics and the words and,
again, bringing [writer] Jonathan Lethem to collaborate on some of those
lyrics. That was really in the front line on this record. We really
concentrated on the vocals. They grounded the pieces in general more so whereas
in the past I would probably say the guitars and the guitar chord changes and
stuff like that really set the tone for what was going on. On this record, it’s
much more vocal-driven.
JPG: I see it at some point in the
future, “Americana artist Lee Ranaldo.”
LR: Yeah. When we first started making this record, I was calling it electronic
folk because we were still working with acoustic guitars and yet we were
putting all these samplers and stuff on top of it and yet it never really lost
that, if not Americana, at least to me it never really lost this certain kind
of folk music sensibility in a certain way with just playing around with
acoustic guitars in a certain way. So, maybe it’s an update, a cross
pollination of the two things.
JPG: I was kidding, a bit, with that comment but your response was illuminating. Now, this ties into what we talked about in the beginning. I saw on your website about the collaboration with Jim Jarmusch, Marc Urcelli and Balazs Pandi. Tell me about that collaboration. Are you still playing Victoriaville [in Ontario] because I see that listed in May?
LR: That’s up in the air at the moment,
also. I don’t really know what’s going to happen with that festival. [Editor’s
Note: It has since been cancelled.]
I’m supposed to play there as well with this Italian duo called My Cat Is An
Alien that has been a friend of Sonic Youth for 20 years now and I don’t know
if they’re going to get out of Italy at this point to get there to that
festival. Who knows at this point? That’s up in the air.
I was really looking forward to that because it would be a first for this project with Jim to play out live. That was a really fun record to cut and I was looking forward to playing live. There’ll be only a few dates if we do anything at all just ‘cause Jim’s so busy doing other stuff.
It’s improv sessions. It’s all
instrumental. It took place in a very prescribed studio session or two where we
recorded all this stuff. We actually recorded enough for a couple of records.
The one that came out six or eight months ago, it’s made it’s way out there and
was really well-received, which I was very happy with. Marc Urcelli works in a
really great studio here in Manhattan and he came up with this idea. He knew
that we all knew each other and he was like, “Let’s just go in and record some
stuff and see what we come up with,” and we all really liked what we came up
with. It was right as Jim was starting to make that last film, the zombie film.
I don’t know if it’s an ongoing collaboration or what at this point but we
definitely got a lot of material out of it.
JPG: That’s cool. Besides the new album
with Raul, do you have any other art projects or books or anything else coming
up?
LR: Well, I’m working on a couple different art projects and art music, kind of crossover projects. I was supposed to go to Texas at the end of this month before we went to Europe to do something. In the 90s I made this record, this CD, called “Amarillo Ramp.” It was inspired by this earth art piece by this guy Robert Smithson. I’m really involved in his work. He did the “Spiral Jetty” out in Utah. And there’s a couple other of his earth art pieces out in the world, one’s in Holland and one’s in Texas. Somebody I know works on this ranch in Texas where this piece is. So, last year I went out and visited it for the first time and we had this idea to go back there and film me performing this piece I wrote about the place and the work at the site where it is. That was supposed to happen 10 days from now and, of course, that was a university-sponsored trip and that’s been canceled now as well.
I’m working on a couple ideas for musical interventions with two of these earth art pieces by this guy Robert Smithson.The one in Texas is definitely gonna happen somewhere down the line. There’s another piece in Holland that I’m working with his foundational estate to maybe do a larger piece involving a whole bunch of musicians out in this landscape where this other piece is.
So, I’m working on these longer-term projects like that. And, there’s a book I put out last year that I self-manufactured and was selling at gigs called “Some Writings On Music and Musicians.” It was small collection, a little pocket book, of writings based on music and about different musicians that I’ve encountered. I’m working on an expanded volume of that right now. There’s actually going to be a Spanish language volume, this expanded edition sometime this year and I’m working with American publishers. I’ve got a couple of different book-related projects in the works.
JPG: Do you think with the extra time on your hands right now that writing may evolve into a Lee Ranaldo autobiography spanning from pre-Sonic Youth to where you are?
LR: That’s an interesting thing to entertain but I think you’ve got to really set aside a big block of time to do something like that and do all the research and put it together. I’m not thinking along those lines at this point. I know that everyone on the planet is writing their memoir. It’s almost something you’ve got to do at this point but I still feel like I would push that down the line. There’s more pressing things than telling my life story right now.
I like the idea of collecting the stuff
I’ve written about music and I continue to write about music. I’m working on a
project with the Bob Dylan archives out in Tulsa that initiated last year and
I’m writing something for there. They’re building a study center out there to
have with Dylan’s archives and when it opens next year or the year after,
they’re gonna launch it with this catalog of various essays on objects and
items in their collection.
I spent a week out there combing through their archives and choosing a couple
of things to write about for them. I’m deep into Dylan, so that’s gonna be an
ongoing relationship with them. I’m already working on some stuff beyond this
essay. I’m writing for them some Dylan-related stuff. It’s cool to have this
place where so much of his archive is centered right now to be able to go out
there and poke around and see his handwritten manuscripts or all the video from
album sessions and things like that.
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