TEAM LAST CALL

Sonic Youth have been perpetuating (and defining) noisy indie rock since 1981. And no one is less impressed by that fact than Sonic Youth, who last month released The Eternal, an album so full of romantic wanderlust and sloppy ferocity that it sounds more like the work of a group a third their age. Apparently, 56 is the new 19.

Where The Eternal doesn’t stray is in its uncompromised approach to rock as a genre to be manipulated, exploited and plundered as a limitless art form. It’s gloriously loud, sparse in places, unnervingly complex in others. While it’s the band’s first indie release in nearly two decades, The Eternal is about as far from a swan song as you can get.

Team Last Call: This album is getting your usual spread of responses, from “This is the best album ever made” to “Here’s more crap from Sonic Youth.”
Steve Shelley: Right! It can go either way. I just try not to get too involved. [laughs] We put a lot of heart and soul into making records together. When you’re finished, you really hope that people will love it and you’ll sell a million albums. But we’ve been making albums for a while, so we kind of know what to expect to some degree: The record will sell OK and some people will really love it and some people will not like it.

TLC: Popular opinion is that The Eternal is a little more raw and ferocious than recent albums. Where do you think that extra fire came from?
SS: I honestly don’t know. Maybe one of the things that influenced this record was, just recently, we had gone out and played Daydream Nation in its entirety, which is a really, really well-liked record of ours. And it’s a bit more of a high-energy record than some of our recent records. We hadn’t played a lot of those songs in almost 20 years, so we had to go back and relearn that album. There’s certain things that you did 20 years ago that you don’t do the same anymore. I think it just made us hear things in our music that we haven’t heard for a while.

TLC: Sometimes it seems so unlikely that a band can make music as challenging as yours and still be able to headline a place like the Electric Factory. What resonates so deeply with your fans?
SS: I imagine it’s the same things that I love about my favorite artists. People are attracted to storytelling or a sound or “I like the way that guy’s guitar tone is.” I don’t know what makes a Sonic Youth fan, but I’m glad they exist. It enables me to play music and enjoy a lot of things that I didn’t really ever think I’d be able to do in this life.

TLC: You just ended a long relationship with the major label system. Does that seem like a big deal to you?
SS: It doesn’t bother me who we make the records for. We’re happy to be on Matador, and there are a lot of things that improved as far as our relationship with our label goes. The good side of working with Geffen is that they never, ever did bother us. When we were making our records, no one ever came by. No one ever asked us to do something differently. We did have all that artistic control that they promise you when you sign the dotted line. I think the things that we had a more difficult time with them were CD pricing a few years ago when CDs were still listing for $18.98, and just business stuff like how they marketed the band. And often we would start a new relationship with someone at the record label – and this happened more than one time – where they would be let go, like, the week before our new album would come out. These people are supposed to help you in the time of a new record.

TLC: You occupy an interesting space between living legends in one respect and, in the pop world, relative anonymity. What’s your perspective on that?
SS: I think we’re kept pretty humble as we travel along. [laughs] A lot of people have not heard Sonic Youth. A lot of people have heard of Sonic Youth, but they’ve never actually heard us. We’re not as popular as whatever music is on American Idol or something like that. But then, you mentioned legends and stuff like that – I think most of the band would deny even being rock stars to you, let alone legends. Thinking about rock star status or legend status is way down on the list of priorities when you’re just trying to live your life.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine