Thurston Moore Talks Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Olivia Rodrigo

As hard as it is to believe, Sonic Youth played their final show 14 years ago this fall, instigated by the breakup of co-founders Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. In the years since, they’ve each continued working on many fronts: Gordon was nominated for a Grammy this year for her solo album The Collective, while Moore has made numerous solo albums of his own, started an indie label called Daydream Library Series with wife Eva Prinz, and published a memoir, Sonic Life.

Late last year, Moore had a brief, surprise onstage reunion with former Sonic Youth bandmates Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley at the New York club the Stone, playing an hour of improvised freeform music that harked back to the band’s heyday. But Moore continues to move on: He’s just taped an interview for Rick Rubin’s podcast, and he’s working on his first novel — set in early Eighties New York, with what he calls “characters and incidents I certainly felt like I could write about.”

In news that shouldn’t surprise anyone, Moore is also paying tribute to the Velvet Underground. Out today is a newly recorded version of the band’s “Temptation Inside Your Heart” (an outtake first released on the VU collection), with Moore joined by his current band (bassist Deb Googe, drummer Jem Doulton, and guitarist James Sedwards) and electronics whiz Jon Leidecker. Hopping on a Zoom from his home in London, Moore talks about that Velvets cover and his own past, present, and rock & roll future.

You’re releasing this version of “Temptation Inside Your Heart” pegged to what would have been the late Sterling Morrison’s 83rd birthday. What does that milestone represent to you?
My wife, Eva, and I published a book, Linger On, a collection of interviews with the Velvet Underground by the Spanish journalist Ignacio Julià [through Moore and Prinz’s book company, Ecstatic Peace Library]. It brought me back into thinking a lot about the Velvets. I always felt Sonic Youth was very much an island in the scene. I liked the idea of community, but also felt we kind of stood apart in some ways. And looking at the Velvet Underground, they were such a model for a band that was completely singular and genuine in the world of rock music.

I always thought Sterling was the most mysterious member of the Velvet Underground, and I wanted to bring attention to his birthday. We know a lot about Lou. We know a lot about Nico. We know a lot about John Cale. Mo Tucker has always had social media presence. They’ve all told their stories in many ways. But Sterling doesn’t get as much ink as everybody else in the group. He never made a solo record. Maybe he passed away too young before he could fathom such a thing.  

I met him once at the old Knitting Factory [in New York]. He was a very sweet guy. I would have liked to have gotten to know him. Listening to the Velvet Underground records, a lot of them are Lou, certainly, but Sterling’s concepts on guitar and his rhythms and melodies move the songs away from the middle ground Lou is establishing as a songwriter. Sterling was the one who brought this really artful rock & roll aesthetic into those Velvet Underground songs.

Of all the songs, what led you to pick “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” an outtake released after the band had broken up?
There’s a certain beatific joyfulness in that song. It’s obviously a bit of a throwaway song happening in the session, with Lou sort of talking through it and asking funny asides and talking to himself back and forth. I don’t make those funny asides. But when he sings “I know where the evil lies inside of your heart,” he’s singing in such a sweet, crooning way. There’s no nihilist energy in the song. The only nihilism is in the lyrics. It’s about this shared feeling of insecurity that everybody has in their relationships to each other.

And it has a good riff.
It’s a driving riff, and then it has that great breakdown with the background vocals. Instead of doing background vocals on my version, I decided to replicate the background vocals on my guitar.

So you’re only releasing one song? No B side?
We were talking about this the other day. More people are buying streams. The idea of an A side or B side, or even a sequenced album, has become secondary, if not tertiary, to the relationship between the artist and the consumer. You tend to do more business song by song. When I put out my last record, Flow Critical Lucidity, I noticed there were people who purchased the album proper as the way I sequenced it, but more people will cherry-pick it.

Thanks to Spotify and other services, you can literally see which songs are popular and which aren’t.
Yeah, you can sort of see what’s going on. I don’t look at that stuff so much. I experience it myself when I’m investigating certain artists and look at their albums online and see which tracks on an album are more popular. It’s interesting. Even if it’s an album like Nantucket Sleighride by Mountain, you can sort of see that, like, “The Animal Trainer and the Road” is the big seller [laughs]. That’s a great song, but that whole album is quite good.  

Which Sonic Youth song is the most popular in that regard?
I have not looked. That’s too frightening for me to even, like, think about. [Ed. Note: Spotify figures show that 1988’s “Teen Age Riot” wins with 87 million streams, followed by 2006’s “Incinerate” with 60 million, their version of “Superstar” from a 1994 Carpenters tribute album with 58 million, and 1990’s “Kool Thing” with 57 million.]

Speaking of Sonic Youth, how did your live reunion with Ranaldo and Shelley last December come about?
That was about as much of a reunion as us having dinner together or something. It was a gig I had at the Stone, and I initially asked Lee to do a guitar duo. We’ve done this before in different places, and I thought it would be cool to ask Steve to play, because he’s in town, and he plays drums. And I thought that would be cool. So that’s all it was. But I did realize it would become a bit of a of a story, since Sonic Youth doesn’t exist anymore and the fact that three of the five members [of the band’s last incarnation] were together on … well, it wasn’t even a stage. We were together on the floor of the Stone. We like to play improvised music, and that was just completely free improvisation.

You didn’t do any “hits,” for sure.
Not at all. It was advertised as just a duo with me and Lee. So when people showed up and then the three of us were there, it became a bit of a buzz. And I understand that.  

Did you feel the weight of any expectations?
No. Nobody was. It’s a small room. It only holds, like, 60 people or something, and it was already sold out. Nobody had any preconception of what was going on. Nobody showed up there whispering, “What’s going to happen?” Afterwards, people started sharing it on social media, and it became a bit of a story, as I understand. I figured that’s what would happen.

Kim wasn’t there, obviously.
She wasn’t around [laughs]. I don’t think she’d be that interested anyway. But my rapport with Steve and Lee, as far as playing in the context of free improvisation, is already pretty established.

What did it make you miss about the band?  
I didn’t think about that. I don’t, like, miss things. I miss the future. I think about things I really want to do. And as far as music is concerned, reformation doesn’t really come into it so much. We had a solid career of 30-plus years, far longer than most bands have had. And the legacy of the recordings stands on its own. I don’t feel like there’s anything left unsaid as far as what we were doing.

The sound of the four, or sometimes five, of you made was unique.
Very much so. But we’re all kind of long in the tooth now. I don’t know if that can ever be recaptured. And I don’t like the whole “re” thing, you know, reforming.

Last year, I asked Kim what it would take for her to be interested in a Sonic Youth reunion, and she said, “I don’t know. It would never be as good as it was.”
[Nods.] I find bands that get back together to be just an exercise. A lot of the time it’s less to do with the band and has more to do with the brand. Unless it’s the OG members, you know, but even, a lot of the aspects of bands that are so important is their youth. And to replicate that is a little bit like a grandmother in a mini-dress, which I don’t want to be. I don’t want to see guys in their seventies reform their bands from when they were in their twenties, and they still have the same haircut when they were in their twenties.

The band has regularly been approached about one-shot reunions, right?
I get asked every day. We all do. It’s a constant thing. I like it because I’m glad we had such an effect and left such a mark. It’s almost otherworldly, in a way, because I’m so proud of it, and it’s such a big part of my life experience. But it’s very encapsulated. It has a great beginning and middle and end.

A pretty dramatic end, actually.
[Shrugs.] You know … I think The Eternal was a really fine final statement.  

Can you see you and Kim back onstage together, even just once?
I know that’s a fantasy. I’m always actually very resistant to such fantasies, in a way.

I’m also wondering what you make of pop artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan headlining festivals like Lollapalooza, which bands like Sonic Youth once did.
With rock & roll bands, it’s all about the interaction a group has in their kind of family onstage. In some ways, this is the advent of the single pop star surrounded by production, whether it’s dancers and lights and films and stage sets. It’s become very sort of Disneyfied, in a way, and it caters to mass popularity in a way Disneyland does. It crosses over from the core rock & roll audience that would see Led Zeppelin or Pearl Jam to a concert that welcomes people who aren’t that invested in rock music at all, but are invested in entertainment as a broader kind of concept. It has a broader appeal than, say, the standardized rock band. There are still rock bands, but they’re not just playing Lollapalooza. They’re not the success stories they once were.

I think all of those musicians are completely credible. Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan are great artists. I just went to see Lana Del Rey, and it was kind of amazing. There was a stage set of a farmhouse, and she was walking in and around it and had dancers everywhere, and she was using AI video. It was something to see. I liked it. I like her music, and I like what she’s up to aesthetically. But at the same time, my predilection is to hear music in a much more intimate setting. I like seeing the interaction between musicians that’s very organic. You know, a musician playing guitar that’s plugged into an amp.

There’s still a demographic of young people interested in experimental rock music and anything that comes out of punk culture. It’s not Olivia Rodrigo huge. But that was never the intention of being in a band anyway, to be on such a massive scale. To me, it was always cooler to have a modest kind of existence in that respect. The big business of rock & roll was a bit of a conflict for somebody like Kurt [Cobain] to all of a sudden be in a band that was so massive. He dealt with it in his own way, and then he didn’t deal with it in his own way.

I don’t know if anyone worries about “selling out” anymore the way he did.
Yeah, it doesn’t really matter anymore. But I would never say that Olivia Rodrigo or Chappell Roan are selling out, because what they’re doing is really smart. Chappell Roan’s promotion of human rights and the LGBTQ community is massive. That’s amazing for her to be able to have that voice, to that many people, or for Olivia Rodrigo to talk about literature on her social media and say put your phones down and start reading a book. It’s not just crass entertainment. More power to them. It’s not really my kind of music. And I certainly don’t strive for that kind of mass acceptance at all. I know it would be great for my pocketbook, but other than that …

Kim achieved a certain level of recognition with a Grammy nomination — the first for anyone in Sonic Youth — for her latest album.
It’s wonderful. That’s nothing but good news. I certainly don’t look down my nose at any of that. It’s great to be rewarded and to have people recognize you on any level. I would never denigrate that at all. When I would see Johnny Rotten refusing to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by writing an acerbic letter, it’s just completely disingenuous. We’re on this planet for such a short time. Why don’t we just embrace each other and not be so self-righteous?

Do you ever wonder if Sonic Youth will get inducted into that Hall of Fame?
It’s not something I ever think about. I feel like we already exist in the Hall of Fame. Maybe not that one. Is there a Noise Rock Hall of Fame?