Just me and my guitar - Lee Ranaldo out in front

The shock implosion of Sonic Youth gave Lee Ranaldo the chance to go out on his own, writes Ed Power

IN LATE 2011, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo received a call from bandmate Kim Gordon. She needed to discuss something, urgently. What Ranaldo didn’t know — couldn’t even suspect — was that Gordon’s husband Thurston Moore (he also happened to be Sonic Youth’s frontman) had confessed to an affair. Their marriage was crumbling and, with it, Sonic Youth, one of the most revered ensembles in American alternative music.

“Kim broke the news that things weren’t going well [for her and Moore], that they thought they were going to split up — and that it would put the band on ice for a while.”

As news of the schism spread, the internet let out a howl of anguish (the story even made mainstream gossip sites such as TMZ and Gawker). Though Sonic Youth had never sold very many records, they set the gold standard for indie-rock credibility. And at the heart of the group — its central dynamic in fact — was what on the outside looked like a happily married couple. People had invested a great deal in Sonic Youth and the Moore-Gordon relationship. For the whole thing to come crashing down plunged a huge swathe of fans into an existential malaise.

Three years on Ranaldo, 58, is no clearer as to the future of Sonic Youth (Gordon and Moore remain thoroughly unreconciled). The flinty Long Islander certainly isn’t sitting on his hands waiting for the ex-couple to resolve their differences. Since the group went on ‘hiatus’— nobody can quite bring themselves to speak of the band in the past tense— he has released two solo albums, raw, songwriterly projects that feel philosophically opposed to Sonic Youth’s chewy, gungy noise-rock.

“It’s a big shift in dynamic for me, for all of us in Sonic Youth,” he says, his ‘Noo Yawk’ accent like something from a 1970s Scorsese movie.“With every one our records, we spent a lot of time in the studio — shaping songs over weeks and weeks, occasionally over months at a time. It wasn’t a normal state of affairs for someone to bring in a song and say ‘here’s something I wrote’.

“You would come in with a basic text which the rest of the band would deconstruct and reconstruct until it was pleasing for everybody. Now, I’m bringing in material to my band — stuff that is pretty well formed. It’s different.”

With his post-Sonic Youth career flourishing — he will shortly visit Ireland for a brace of unplugged solo dates — there’s an argument that the group’s difficulties might be a blessing in disguise. Had Gordon and Moore remained together, Ranaldo would never had an opportunity to flourish as a songwriter. He would have remained Sonic Youth’s loyal lieutenant, one of its creative engines, for sure, and yet destined to be perennially overshadowed by his bandmates.

“Everyone in the group is engaged in projects that would not have had time to breathe if Sonic Youth had been going on….It’s fair to say that this whole thing [his solo career] would not have come about,” he acknowledges. “During the whole time in Sonic Youth I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.”

He understands why fans might raise their eyebrows at the prospect of an acoustic tour from a member of Sonic Youth. Tenderness and frailty were never part of the group’s repertoire: their songs were jagged, delirious — and occasionally unlistenable. The band believed that, to jolt the listener out of complacency, it was sometimes necessary to confront them with art that was messy and unpalatable. You can’t really do that when it’s just you and an acoustic guitar.

“Acoustic music is not something I’ve done as a public performer,” he nods. “Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically — quite frankly, it wasn’t something we really that interested in.”

That isn’t to say picking up a guitar and strumming a tune is a new experience.

“I’ve always played acoustically — it’s how I learned. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dylan and what have you. Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people’s perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition — and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.”

Ranaldo has been coming to Ireland since the late ’80s. He has especially warm memories of the short tour Sonic Youth undertook in 1991, accompanied by an up-and-coming band from Seattle. The brace of gigs they played, at the Top Hat in Dun Laoghaire and Sir Henry’s in Cork, have entered Irish music folklore —and clearly mean a lot to the guitarist also.“Because of what happened to Nirvana subsequently that whole tour has taken on mythic qualities,” he says. “It was a strong period for Sonic Youth to begin with. We had made [seminal LP] Goo and were recording Dirty. We were getting really turned on by what all these bands in Seattle were coming up with. It was a high time for us — we were entering our ‘second period’ if you will. We were signed to a major label, which was very different from what it had been like in the ’80s. People were suddenly paying attention to what we call indie music now.

“Nirvana had started as this local young band who, along with Mudhoney and a few others, were opening shows for us. It became apparent Nirvana had the songwriting and the potential to be much more than that. During that tour we saw the entire music industry change, as a result of the success Nirvana were having. It was an intense and interesting time and I remember those Irish gigs well.

“We hadn’t played Ireland a lot at that point. It was special for us to go there and take with us this band that was challenging us to play even better every night. It was so much fun.”

• Lee Ranaldo plays solo acoustic shows at Bello Bar, Dublin on October 24; and at St Patrick’s Church, Waterford on October 25 as part of Imagine Arts Festival. imagineartsfestival.com