Deep Voices #83: Lee Ranaldo

A brief consideration of Sonic Youth’s George Harrison

Deep Voices #84 on Spotify
Deep Voices #84 on Apple Music

Midway through his review of Thurston Moore’s new autobiography, Sonic Life, Jeremy Gordon asks an interesting question about Moore’s relationship with fellow Sonic Youth guitar player Lee Ranaldo: “Are he and Lee … friends?” Where Ranaldo is mentioned is usually in praise of his skill as a player. Ranaldo, Moore’s bandmate for decades, is, obviously, a key figure in Moore’s life, but Moore’s inner life is left mostly unexplored. I didn’t necessarily mind this. I loved the book, which I looked at as something between a subjective diary and a very long, excellent Wikipedia article about underground and alternative music. 

If you’re reading this, I’ll presume you have at least a passing interest in Sonic Youth. But just in case—they are a touchstone in underground rock music, largely known for figuring out how to bottle the sprawling dissonance of the avant garde with the tight chords of punk and hardcore. Reading about the journey thorugh Moore’s eyes, Gordon’s question lingered. I wondered less if he and Ranaldo were friends and more how their creative partnership—alongside the band’s two other primary membersMoore’s then wife, bassist/guitarist/vocalist, Kim Gordon and stalwart drummer Steve Shelley—functioned. In the beginning of Moore’s book, he writes with a tinge of jealousy about how Ranaldo had been included in composer Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra when Moore himself didn’t (at first) make the cut. Though Moore became the figurehead and most frequent vocalist of Sonic Youth, Ranaldo’s downtown, avant garde chops were solidified before Moore’s. Ranaldo was never as prevalent on record as Moore. Moore was the vocalist for half, at least, of their songs, and on most albums, Ranaldo fronted a song or two. Those moments are among the band’s most sublime. Did Moore’s frontman status create any tension? Or was Ranaldo largely content to cede the spotlight? This is all heresy, but there’s a longtime rumor that, when Ranaldo’s song “Genetic” was cut off the final track list of Sonic Youth’s Dirty, he threatened to quit. Were there other moments like that?

Despite his foundational penchant for noise, Ranaldo has a devout love of the Beatles. In one interview, he praises Paul McCartney, and says he stole from him for a solo track, “Waiting on a Dream.” But I think he’s clearly the George Harrison of the group (with Moore as McCartney, Gordon as Lennon, and Shelley as Ringo). The solid, reliable, curious, player who kept his head down, but who, as a frontman, popped up with clear moments of beauty a few times on each album. Maybe it won’t surprise you to learn that “Long, Long, Long”—with its proto Sonic Youth dissolution at the end—is my favorite Beatles song. As for Ranaldo’s work with Sonic Youth, listen to “Hoarfrost,” “Skip Tracer,” “Karen Revisited,” and you’ll find some of the most powerful songs the band ever recorded. 

For this playlist, I’ve collected some of those moments. There are my favorite Sonic Youth tracks where Ranaldo is the vocalist, as well as a few of his solo recordings. Listening together, at least to the Sonic Youth songs, it presents a different way of hearing the band. An album of Ranaldo tracks where his in between moments carry the narrative. It gives them a softer dominance. An alternate history, which is something you don’t usually get to live.  

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•Washing Machine was the first Sonic Youth album I ever heard and “Skip Tracer” the first Ranaldo song I fell in love with. It just seemed so…weird. “Shouting the poetic injustices of high school journal keepers,” he shouts, singing about the woman in the band at the center of the song. “Shouting poetic injustices of high school journal keepers,” could be a burn, but there’s sweetness to how he says it, like that was what he was doing himself. He’s a dreamy, moody lyricist, but he’s not impressionistic. The diary of a daydreamer. He calls this song a “talking blues” and that feels right, his vocals delivered with the unperturbed gusto of open mic night or drunk karaoke. Like “Bukowski doing an audiobook,” I wrote in a review of the album. That feels right. Ranaldo’s from Long Island, though he doesn’t have too heavy of an accent, but when he sing/talks, it’s got a macho tone, like he’s one mechanic relaying a tale to another. It meanders. There are characters, a scene, but little momentum. He circles the drain. 

The song itself builds and builds, a guitar note repeated that sounds like a satellite pinging home. The other guitar is a buzzsaw. The whole thing sounds like it’s building to an explosion but instead it disintegrates. “Hello 20, 15!” he yells before a squall of feedback. Not sure what that means. A “skip tracer” is, essentially, a bounty hunter. It doesn’t necessarily have to be someone as aggressive as a bounty hunter who is doing the tracing, but that’s the basic idea: someone missing, who shouldn’t be, gets found. It feels like a very American idea, both the disappearance and the need to find you in order to not lose money. 

The coolest thing about this song might be its first 20 seconds. They’re instrumental, one downward strum from the stringed instruments and one hit of the cymbal and kick drum. You can picture Ranaldo shaking the neck of the guitar to chase the tone until it dissolves. It’s like an incantation to what is about to happen. There’s a moment of silence and then a hint of feedback and we’re off to the races. 

The other coolest thing might be this throwaway line: “None of us know what we’re trying to get to/What sort of life are we trying to build?” It’s so Tony Robbins. Did he like the life he built? Seems like a decent one. Ambitious, artistic, humble, sweet. That verse continues with a conclusion as old as time. “LA is more confusing now than anywhere I’ve ever been to.” LOL. “I’m from New York City. Breathe it out and let it in.” Such an iconic statement of pride. I don’t know how else to say this—the song just makes him seem like he’s a nice, cool, good person; someone unpretentious, open. Sonic Youth songs are always passionate but sometimes they are cold. But never Ranaldo’s songs.

•“Hoarfrost” is Ranaldo's prettiest Ranaldo song. Maybe the prettiest Sonic Youth, period. My wife absolutely hates Sonic Youth (dissonance is her enemy) but I played this song at home without telling her who it was and she didn’t make me turn it off. It’s a hushed song, Ranaldo barely speaking in an inside voice. The guitar hums sweetly (I believed Kim Gordon plays guitar on the track as well, so there would be three of them, whispering at each other). I’ve always imagined the song is about a father and son going hunting or taking on a winter hike with someone you have a crush on. It’s about trust. “We’ll know where when we get there, you said.” That “you said” always gets me. The first line, though, on its own, feels like such a romantic tribute: “I put my foot deep in the tracks that you made.” The merge of two people on one pathway. If Sonic Youth ever wrote a love song, this is it. 

•In Moore’s book, in the ’90s, he describes in detail being stuck in between the underground and fame. Sonic Youth were friends and, once, peers with Nirvana, and the music industry was hoovering up rock bands hoping to break them on the same level. This is how you got both Pearl Jam and the Butthole Surfers on major labels. Sonic Youth, too, on David Geffen’s DGC. Ultimately Sonic Youth were staples of MTV’s alternative show “120 Minutes,” but their music’s inherent difficultness never let them obtain a fully saturated popularity. How much of that was self sabotage? 

Their album Dirty was released in 1992, prime time for grunge and alternative. And, if the above-mentioned rumor is true, the band (just Moore? Everyone minus Ranaldo?) and their A&R opted to leave out “Genetic.” If they were in fact looking for that mainstream success with any earnestness, they would have kept it on. It’s propulsive, with ramming the thing home on drums. Ranaldo is singing here, and the whole thing sounds like a cleaner Dinosaur Jr, who had a minor hit with “Feel the Pain” two years later. In fact, it sounds as much like pop-punk as grunge. A hit! Well, at least the first half is. After 90 seconds, the song slows and shifts into low gear. It builds back up again, but without the same rhythmic cohesion. Maybe that’s how Ranaldo wanted it. Or maybe he wanted it to eschew linearity to fit in with his bandmates and with the album. I guess it didn’t work. Imagine if they just repeated those first 90 seconds again (this live performance is close). Would it have made the album then? If so, would they have found another kind of fame? 

•When I heard Ranaldo’s 2021 EP In Virus Times, I had an inverse “Dylan goes electric” shock—Ranaldo goes acoustic. Once you’ve made enough noise the surprise is its absence. But Ranaldo says he was first an acoustic player as a kid before picking up the electric guitar. At home during Covid quarantine, he wrote the four-part In Virus Times on the acoustic guitar. The first few times I heard it, I thought it was too heavily John Fahey influenced to feel original—Fahey being the godhead of solo acoustic guitar. But as I spent more time with it, the sour notes Ranaldo plays feel more monstrous, ready for battle than anything Fahey would play. It’s like how a small animal puffs up its chest in the face of predators to make itself seem big. The way he plays the guitar, slowly and with resonance, you can hear the fear and determination that defined that heart of the pandemic. I think I needed to be past that moment to really appreciate it. Not Ranaldo. He was always ahead of his time.