Thurston Moore in a Nutshell

Next May, Thurston Moore’s solo debut, Psychic Hearts, will turn 30 years old. When those songs came out, Sonic Youth was going strong, riding the momentum of an all-time four-record run, beginning with Daydream Nation in 1988 and ending with Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star six years later. Psychic Hearts was a quick record to make, founded on principles shouldered toward the mainstream by Nirvana, whose punk rock was built on simple chord structures—pieces of songs that gave bands like Sonic Youth so much significance and inspired Moore, who was always attracted to the “economics of composition” and creating convoluted music.

It was as if Kurt Cobain’s vision emphasized what the Ramones had done 10 years before him, and it was being replicated in the material getting put out by riot grrrl groups that Nirvana’s existence helped galvanize—younger bands who were “learning that morning” and were raw and immediate. “And I loved that and I wanted to reference that with Psychic Hearts while Sonic Youth was getting more involved with more sophisticated measures in composition, because we had been playing together for so long and we really would dig our heels in,” Moore tells me. “Our records were far more elaborate, as far as making punk or post-punk music, although there are some of the Sonic Youth records that were just a couple of different chords, two frets—it was all about that kind of simplicity, even on a song like ‘100%.’”

Moore composed the 15-song Psychic Hearts tracklist while he was in Japan with Kim Gordon and Julie Cafritz, who had started Free Kitten together in 1992. They were all traveling east so Gordon and Cafritz could hook up with Yoshimi P-We, the drummer from Boredoms, and turn Free Kitten into a trio. An Osaka record store called Time Bomb was organizing the link, pairing Free Kitten with Moore and Gordon’s bandmate Steve Shelley’s new band Mosquito, which he’d formed with Tim Foljahn of Two Dollar Guitar, in the process. “I was going to go along just to take care of business,” Moore laughs. “And I was asked to play solo, so I wrote a bunch of minimalist solo guitar songs.” While in Japan, Moore connected with Keiji Haino to do a free noise, improvisational set, and it helped him strip the work down even further. Psychic Hearts was becoming as economic as Moore hoped it would be. Upon returning to the States, he and Gordon welcomed their daughter Coco into the world and Moore decamped to Sear Sound to make Psychic Hearts with Shelley and Foljahn during one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most uncertain transitions.

“It was at a time right after Kurt passed away, and there was a lot of that weird energy in the air,” Moore says. “But, there was also this feeling that a lot of what had come out of Nirvana’s short life was really, really becoming important to us, specifically the sounds of a band like Bikini Kill—who [Sonic Youth] became very close to, and we would do a lot of touring together. Kathi [Wilcox], Tobi [Vail], Kathleen [Hanna] and Billy [Karren]’s energy was really significant to us, and we would tour in Australia together, with them and the Beastie Boys. That’s where Kathleen and Ad-Rock met, and it was just good fun.” At the same time, Foo Fighters were just beginning and did support tours with Sonic Youth in New Zealand, and a vacancy had generated buzz amidst skepticism. Moore and his peers fed off of that, hoping that out of it would come a legible identity for the future of rock music.

“It was a really interesting period, where we had been around for over a decade—and getting into our second decade—and then these new bands were coming up and coming out of the scene we came out of, especially the late ‘80s scene of bands from the Pacific Northwest. It had a lot of energy to it, and a lot of it was in honor of Kurt’s energy. All of a sudden, he was gone. There was this feeling that we needed to rally around each other and create some new music and new energy and, in the face of that, that’s what was going on with Psychic Hearts.” The album’s title track itself was predicated upon Cobain’s absence, written about, as Moore puts it, “an ungetatable kind of desire or love” you have for someone who is dead and gone and no longer available to you. So, he embodied characters who were isolated with only their thoughts and an intense, passionate grappling with longing.

Despite those years between 1993 and 1995 being some of Moore’s most productive, he’s not much interested in turning back the clock or employing those same ideas again. “I feel like I exhausted those, in a way,” he chuckles. “A lot of people are memorializing a lot of that era right now—and I certainly did, to some degree, with Sonic Life, even though, when the book gets to that point, I start blowing through that era a little quicker than I did with the ‘70s and ‘80s, because it’s less of a developmental period as things become more rote. Album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, and then it’s like, ‘How many times can you talk about these episodes?’ I think the histories of that era are really personal.”

Moore mentions Hanna’s recent book, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, and how he thought he knew a lot about what was going on with her, after having toured with Bikini Kill so often. “But I didn’t,” he concludes. “What she dispels in her memoir was completely fascinating to me. She really represented a generation that was at least a half-generation younger than me and a full generation younger than where Lee and Kim were at their age. Kim is five years older than I am, Lee’s about three years older than I am. But, those years make a big difference when you’re in your early 20s. When you get older, not so much, but, regardless, even at that time, I still felt like I had one leg in the music of people who are older than me and then another leg in the music of people who are younger than me.”

In New York City in the early 1980s, Moore found himself playing in drone orchestras with the likes of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, folks who had a couple of years on the Sonic Youth guitarist in the scene where he would, eventually, meet Gordon and Lee Ronaldo. “I was still coming out of this desire to be in a punk rock band,” Moore says. “And that generation was more into ‘Well, it died with Sid Vicious.’ Seeing bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag happening in the early ‘80s, I was like, ‘Well, au contraire, I don’t believe that at all.’ It’s actually a much more interesting reappraisal of what punk rock was with hardcore, and I really became enamored by it—much to the disinterest of most people I was playing with. I don’t think Lee and Kim were that interested in that. Certainly Glenn and Rhys didn’t care about that stuff so much. But I really championed it, and I really brought a lot of its aesthetic into what Sonic Youth was doing at the time. And, to the credit of the band, they also brought that too.”

Steve Shelley had played drums in the Crucifucks, a group Moore considers to be one of the greatest and most infamous hardcore bands to come out of the Midwest. “I took Lee to see the Crucifucks at CBGB’s hardcore matinee, because I had been communicating with Steve through the mail and I said, ‘Oh, you should check this band out with me.’ And Lee would go with me once in a while to see these bands, but he didn’t really take it to heart as much as I did.” It’s true, as Moore started cutting his hair really short, thinking he was a hardcore kid. “But I wasn’t,” he admits. “And hardcore bands didn’t accept Sonic Youth until a little bit later, when they got older and they left that initial hardcore scene. The ones who continue to make music in any certain way, like Ian MacKaye in Fugazi or just Rollins with Rollins Band, are the ones who, all of a sudden, started looking at Sonic Youth as being an interesting band.” At the time, Moore and his bandmates were connected to the Butthole Surfers, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust and Meat Puppets, along with, as he puts it, “Black Flag’s ‘letting-their-hair-down’ era”—bands that were leaning far more experimental as they were retreating from the clutches of hardcore.

“But we didn’t come out of hardcore,” Moore furthers, “so we were outliers in almost every aspect of whatever scene there was. We were always a little less easy to pigeonhole genre-wise. We felt like we had to create our own community, and that’s how we got connected to Michael Gira and Swans, and they became our contemporaries. When younger bands, like Dinosaur Jr., started coming in, we recognized in them more of what we were interested in, as opposed to what we were coming out of. We really latched onto them, and Jesus and Mary Chain and the Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. They took us out on their very first tour, and that was really important for us as a young band in the mid-‘80s.”

Soon, word about bands like Mudhoney, who sprung from the ashes of Green River, started to swirl when Bruce Pavitt began putting out records by regional bands from the Pacific Northwest under the label name Sub Pop, and those artists became Sonic Youth’s most significant peers when the 1980s became the 1990s. On his new album, Flow Critical Lucidity, Moore performs some “romantic memory-jogging” on songs like “New in Town” and “Shadow,” which make references to Washington, D.C. and the slam, punk and hardcore bands, like Fugazi and Red C, that came out of that scene. On “Shadow” in particular, Moore writes and sings about cross-country venues where brilliant people could find solidarity (“Our town remains sanctified / Stars burn, you saw it too”), continuing the story of blood-boiling love wrapped in a city-bound lostness penned by his writing partner Radieux Radio (the pseudonym of his wife, Eva Prinz) on “New in Town” (“We’re high on your energy / We are straight-edge library / Girl boy slam into me / Boy girl slam into me”). Moore attributes those two tracks to his “scholarly desire” toward the reality of what those environments were and what they meant. “When I wrote [Sonic Life], I really wanted it to be more of a series of essays about what these significant documents were for me, going into the vocation of being a musician,” he says. “I really wanted to do extensive essaying about Patti Smith’s first book or poetry or Horses, or the Ramones album, or other ephemeral documents.”

Moore and Prinz have collaborated together since 2014, on his solo record The Best Day. “She’ll bring lyrics in and I utilize them and it’s great for me, because it’s another voice, another instrument, and it’s certainly a feminist voice, which is something that I can’t bring as purely into the music, so I really appreciate that, and it’s a very unique take on certain shared fascinations we have,” he says. “When she handed me those [‘New in Town’] lyrics about that positive mental attitude aspect of D.C. hardcore, I was really bemused, because it’s the whole idea of being new in town and thinking about going to those shows.”

“I would go alone a lot,” Moore says, “and I would always see some young person at those shows who was, obviously, also alone and they were kind of new in town. That was where all the other cool kids were who were doing something creative, as opposed to going and getting drunk at some fucked up frat party—going to the hardcore show, where there was this idea of an alternative lifestyle of taking responsibility for your culture. So, in some ways, there was something really very sweet about that. You were new in town and watching a Minor Threat gig and knowing that it was defining your sensibility to such a profound degree, and I know that was the case for so many people—and it continues to be. I think a lot of interaction with culture, subculture, rock ‘n’ roll music, soul music, hip-hop, whatever—it has that effect. And there’s just a certain dignity to it, as information for somebody at that age. They were very personal; those spaces were, in retrospect, really important clubhouses.”

On our call, Moore shouts out the still-living members of that D.C. scene, folks who are now in their 50s and 60s and sharing their stories on social media. “They’re constantly putting up images that are all about memory,” he explains. “They’re all about what was happening in ‘81 and how it defined our lives forever, even though we’re grizzled and 60-year-old, domesticated family men or women living in the suburbs. Their social media feeds are just like, ‘Here I am at 19 checking out Black Flag, that’s me in the corner over there. I was new in town.’” Moore is fascinated by digital media and the access it’s given to society so it can “constantly relive the glory of its youth” and share it with other generations. It’s an exchange between people, something becoming rarer and rarer in a world as chaotic and noisy as this one. Sometimes, it’s hard to parse through all of that static and all of that yelling. It certainly is that way for Moore.

“It’s almost like a lunatic asylum, when I see what’s going on in the USA from week to week within the so-called ‘adult world,’” he says. “What’s next? Is some alien gonna come down and start a third party that galvanizes the country? You never know. At this point, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, what a year!’ and every year we’re saying that! You keep pushing and pulling at this wishful representation of who you are as a society, and it’s like, ‘Where is it going?’ It’s always cynical. I think about somebody like Allen Ginsberg, who didn’t live long enough to see this insanity. Amiri Baraka, William Burroughs, what would their take be on this?”

Moore’s collaborative nature in 2024 is not unlike what it was in 1981. “Even in Sonic Youth, writing the music, it would always be composed in the rehearsals and then brought into the studio and recorded and refined,” he says. “And then it would be like, ‘Okay, who’s singing what song?’ We would pick and choose, and very rarely would it be one of us writing words for the other to sing. It happened a couple of times, but very rarely.” Moore has always enjoyed writing lyrics, though he’s transparent that, over the years, it has been a bit of a challenge. On Flow Critical Lucidity, just two out of the seven songs are explicitly his. Five of them were written by Radieux Radio, and few of those five were, as Moore puts it, “somewhat collaborative.”

Speaking with Thurston Moore is like opening an encyclopedia to a random section and reading whatever the first paragraph is at the top of the page. His world is, naturally, consumed by music. During our call, he is hunkered down in a backroom at Rough Trade West in London, the city where he spends most of his time. With inaudible stage noise falling through the walls around him, he delivers a monologue about bands with “lyrics coming from the outside,” like Patti Smith and Blue Ӧyster Cult, Robert Hunter and the Grateful Dead or Pete Brown and Cream. “Henry Rollins in Black Flag, 99% of the lyrics he was singing were written by Greg Ginn. I was like, ‘Well, here’s a singer who has a lot to say!’” Moore says. “Henry is, if anything, a man of opinion. It’s very true. It wasn’t until he had a solo career when he could actually pen his own lyrics and express himself beyond Greg Ginn. I understand that that’s what that relationship was, but, for me, I don’t have to own everything about the composition.” When Sonic Youth was still going, the band was a total democracy. “I knew that any other band I woud have it would not be that, because it would be my name and I would be calling the shots,” he continues. But he would never tell Deb Googe, James Sedwards, Jem Doulton, Steve Shelley or John Leidecker what to play. Moore allows them to create their own music; it’s why they’re in his band to begin with—because he knows that they can do that.

“I may say, ‘Well, that’s too bombastic’ or ‘That’s not what I want,’” Moore continues. “But, for the most part, I’m very liberal about it, and I appreciate just about anything that comes up. I get all the music songwriting credit because it’s my name on the marquee. I remember reading about David Bowie’s songwriting, and if you talk to anybody who recorded the music with him, they’re like ‘I wrote that lick, I wrote this. I brought that in, and he just took it.’ He took it because who else is going to take it? It’s in the context of a David Bowie session. It’s his song, that’s all there is to it. If you want to keep that lick for yourself and create your own song, go for it. See what happens. It’s probably nothing, but Bowie was able to give it center-stage. I understand that. I don’t think it’s the same with the Rolling Stones putting their names on blues songs or Jimmy Page putting his name on what was obviously somebody else’s ‘Dazed and Confused.’ I think there’s some arguments there and, again, it was also a learning situation coming out of the ‘60s—with the exploitation of other songwriters, especially with publishers. It’s an interesting story that I don’t think has been talked about enough.”

Moore pauses for a moment. “It’d be a good book—about proprietary rock ‘n’ roll.” I tell him that someone should write it, giving a wink and a nod that, just maybe, he could tackle it. He doesn’t give any sort of affirmation to the suggestion. Instead, he gives the most Thurston Moore-style of answer you could imagine: “George Harrison getting sued for ‘My Sweet Lord’ because it was too much like a ‘50s doo-wop song—those are very interesting stories. They are for me, because it was all about this community that shared and exchanged ideas. ‘Well, God forbid you get too close to my idea.’ It gets down to legal matters, and legal matters have nothing to do with rock ‘n’ roll. It destroys everything, so that’s why rock ‘n’ roll should always be anarchy.”

But Moore would never sing a lyric that he feels like he doesn’t hold an affinity of some kind for, no matter who wrote it. He and Prinz, as he puts it, “have a very intimate life, as a married couple, so there’s a lot of shared aesthetics and fascinations and there’s a lot of trust there.” He finds that dynamic rewarding, how their lyricism differs. “My own lyrics tend to be a bit more too much of a mouthful sometimes, and they reference different ideas I have about how lines work on a page,” he admits. “Eva’s lyrics have a bit more of an openness to them, which I think is really a good energy that I sometimes don’t have—that way of being more minimal while expressing a certain interest of curiosity or viewpoint; the intellect of nature, climate change, that kind of politic, which I would usually shy away from.”

Moore salutes Fugazi’s “Suggestion,” a pointed song that’s meaning is obvious but, when you read the lyrics, is very obtuse. “They’re not really that direct about the idea,” he says. “That idea is in there, but the lyrics themselves might as well be some experimental poem. If you ask Nick Cave, he’s just like, ‘I don’t know what I’m writing about.’ He writes such prolific lyrics that have all this intrigue of being profound and they’re evocative. He doesn’t need to know what they’re about. He’s writing them, he’s channeling something. Something about those lyrics, for him, are very personal, whatever they are, and the listener can draw their own concepts, ideas, or conclusions from them.”

“Brian Eno always wrote the most evocative lyrics early on, with Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain, but he says that they were just dada, that they didn’t mean anything. I was like, ‘Well, they meant something to me, because I brought meaning to them. They were so weird and clever,’” he continues. “‘Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,’ I mean, come on, where does that line come from? It’s a great line, and it brings all kinds of different ideas into my mind. But he was just throwing them off as like, ‘Yeah, they do sound good, but they don’t mean anything. They’re just in service to the music, and they give the music a certain character.’ That’s perfectly valid, then you have straight-ahead lyric-writing like Bruce Springsteen. There’s room for everything; that’s all there is.”

Moore’s work, whether it’s solo material or something with a Sonic Youth sticker slapped over it, is all about departures. 30 years ago, he wanted to get away from the minimal, streamlined and “purposefully quieter” sound of Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, which Sonic Youth conjured in an effort to juxtapose themselves with the more metal-driven, monetizing moves that Stone Temple Pilots and Bush were making. “I didn’t think that was what we were about, and it really wasn’t—to the point where we got rid of the bass guitar, where Kim started playing six-string guitar,” Moore says. “We had three six-string guitarists and a bass that was happening with Steve Shelley’s kick-drum. It wasn’t until Jim O’Rourke started coming in that we reintroduced the bass guitar again.”

People have said that Moore’s last few solo records (Rock n Roll Consciousness, Spirit Council, By the Fire, etc.) sound like Sonic Youth records. “I was like, ‘Well, there’s a reason for that,’ and I don’t mind it,” he continues. “I know that I have a specific vocabulary, and I’m okay with that.” But Flow Critical Lucidity is a new left turn for him, a result that likely stemmed from him asking his guitar player, James Sedwards, to play keyboards. He also employed electronic musician John Leidecker to bring “different voicings” to the arrangements. In Moore’s eyes, it’s a record that isn’t replicable live. “I mean, I could play it if I really got down to some intensified rehearsals and analyzed exactly what we did,” he argues, “but a lot of it was recorded in a moment of detuning the instruments and using different instruments to create different rhythms and sound ideas. They weren’t really captured with a video camera to see exactly what was going on. It was in the moment.”

Moore and Prinz wrote the songs at a writer’s residency at La Becque on on the shores of Lake Geneva in a red-hot Switzerland summertime. Artists working through mediums of sculpture and sound were present too, but they “locked themselves away in their appointed rooms, doing their work” while Moore and Prinz utilized a playing room on the property, recording demos on the fly before bringing them back to Total Refreshment Studios in London. “The feeling of being in these majestic throes of nature with this huge, beautiful lake and the Alpine Mountains surrounding us, there was all that energy, and it was feeding into our composing,” Moore says.“In London, I was using the demo tapes, just recording on top of them and really experimenting. It’s probably the most experimental record, as far as a song record goes, that I’ve made and I’ve yet to make. I found it to be really rewarding, and it fits into my desire to not tour so much anway, to get in a van and play every beer-soaked venue around the planet.”

The tone of Flow Critical Lucidity is derived from the relationship between the rural (Switzerland) and the urban (London), offering a unique coalescence of city grit and countryside tranquility. “I just allowed it to exist however it exists,” Moore asserts. “Even in Sonic Youth, having records that sounded like they had been recorded nowhere except New York City, that always made sense to me. The sounds of your environment have to be informative.” Much of that was yielded from Margo Broom’s mixing when Moore brought tapes to her at Hermitage Studios in 2023, and she turned the record into an end-product that he would never have thought of on his own. “She really allowed it to have all these different, very subtle dynamics. For me, it was like hearing the music anew,” he says, before going on a tangent. “I would have never mixed it that way, but, you know, Iggy would have never mixed Raw Power the way Bowie mixed it, either. Bowie’s mix of Raw Power is fantastic, it just sounds coke-blasted and really fucked up, glammed out. It’s a weirdly violent-sounding record and then, when Iggy remixed it to what he thought his intention was, it just sounded like another hard rock record—although it was a Stooges record, it sounded more typical. The Bowie mix is anything but typical.”

Moore likens his interest in mixing to finding black metal cassette recordings that sound like they were made “three buildings down with a handheld recorder in a basement while the band is a half-mile away,” before returning to the Raw Power of it all. “I got it when it came out,” he says. “I was 15 or something, and it just sounded like nothing else on Earth. I know it was all in error, to some degree, because the band hated it—but it didn’t really matter. There was something else going on there that was otherworldly. There has never been a record that sounds exactly like that, and there never will be.”

The focus returns to Broom’s mix, as Moore notes that Flow Critical Lucidity plays to him in a way where it sounds beyond him. “Maybe that had to do with Margo’s mixing style, where it became almost like somebody else’s record because it’s not how I would have ever thought it was going to sound like,” he continues. “But I liked it. When I hear it now, I’m still surprised by it. Usually when I’m mixing my records, I’m just sitting there with a mix engineer and just getting things into place. I have a tendency to have things be fairly straightforward, as far as balance and what-have-you—really direct, really dry. It’s not the best idea. Maybe it’s always good to allow somebody else to bring a new flavor. That’s new for me. You always hope to learn something new when you make another record after 45 years.”

Flow Critical Lucidity is an album that is as abstract and psychedelic as it is human. The record is bare-bones and languid in many places (“We Get High”) and kaleidoscopic and heavenly in others (“Sans Limites”). Each note contrasts with Moore’s past, building a lexicon out of the hallowed halls of a Sonic Youth album like Confusion is Sex while fading in its own sound like a colossus folding inward. The record feeds us acts of human disruption and then contradicts those textures with contemplative, soulful reckonings about birthplaces and dreamworlds. There is nothing telegraphed about these seven songs. And, in the liner notes for Flow Critical Lucidity, Moore highlights players on each track who are LGBTQIA+ musicians. It may remind some of how he has, in the past, spoken about his attraction to marginalized takes on music and the subversive texts within those takes. There’s a certain humanity that Moore is chasing on these records, broken up by fits of very pensive yet eruptive acts of God-like transitions—a curiosity unknowable and indescribable, “offering something that’s kind of uplifting, even if it’s dealing with more darker or depressive aspects of one’s life.” “Being able to really, actually, physically touch somebody with the abstraction that music is, I find that there’s magical interplay there, and I feel like that can only happen if you let it define itself,” he says.

Moore also doesn’t care about how his music is accepted anymore, citing that he doesn’t have to sell himself in the music industry anymore. In 2021, he put an album called Screen Time up on Bandcamp and “thought nothing of it.” “I just wanted to put it up. It was instrumental music that was an imaginary soundtrack session,” he notes. “I never really had too much of an agenda when recording or making a record.” He pauses. “Maybe in later Sonic Youth there were some ideas—like, ‘Oh, maybe this record will sell more units.’ But even then, I didn’t really care about that. When we did Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, I remember asking our management, ‘Do you think we should make this next record a little more heavy or get more minimal?’ And our manager, John Silva, said, ‘You’re not making another Experimental Jet Set. You’re not gonna do that again, are you?’ Everybody around us was making these big, slathering post-grunge rock records, and we were going in the opposite direction and referencing what we were liking about Sebadoh, for God’s sake. The commercial move would have been if we followed what was going on with the Stone Temple Pilots of the world, because we had our foot in the door, so why not take advantage of that and really give them what they want? That’s not who we were.”

For Moore, undoubtedly one of the greatest guitarists to ever stand on a stage in-front of anyone, his music has never been about the experimentation with his instrument, either. It was always about the experimentation of song structure. “I think anybody can fuck around with the guitar and put a serrated drumstick under the 12th fret,” he laughs. “Rubbing the other stick against it, it looks like a crucifix. All kinds of signals are going on there. At the same time, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, what are you doing to that precious guitar?’” Moore never took any kind of traditional guitar lesson, except for when he was really young and walked out of a class because he had to “learn ‘Kumbaya’ or something” and then, upon seeing Johnny Ramone play barre chords for an entire set, saw his whole world crack open under the tutelage of downstroking, power-melody paragons.

“The fact that you can change the tuning of the string from one radical extreme to the other allows you to have this incredible playing field, and I never felt like I’ve reached a dead end with the guitar or courting ideas,” he continues. “It’s like sitting at a piano where you can, if you need to, actually construct something that has a bit of a distinct melody. You can do that on the guitar. On one hand, the guitar facilitates me actually being able to play any sort of music. On the other hand, there’s this incredible connection to this lineage of how fucking cool the electric guitar is and rock ‘n’ roll music.”

To this day, Moore doesn’t believe that he’s a high-technique guitar player. When he adorned the cover of Guitar Player in August 1991, he felt like a charlatan, because he “didn’t know how to play any real standard guitar beyond a couple major chords.” “I’m on the cover of this magazine that’s all about guitar playing technique and I was really conflicted about it,” he adds. “Like, why are you celebrating me in this magazine that deals with this? But I think that was the idea with a lot of guitar players, that people who actually take the instrument and extend the vocabulary of it with some kind of artfulness or some serious-mindedness or some dignity. I’m not a guitar geek, I don’t go to guitar stores and look at guitars. When I go on tour, the other guitarists do this and I’m going to the second-hand bookstore. I can’t afford another guitar anyway. I like the two guitars I have and I like the tunings I’ve established and I keep those for a long time. Eventually, I will go somewhere else with another tuning and investigate the aspects of that.”

I found about Thurston Moore 12 years ago, when I was only 14 but found myself eating up every word of SPIN’s greatest guitarists of all time list, which placed Moore and Lee Ranaldo at #1. I had no idea who or what Sonic Youth was, but then I heard those spitfuck, two-part riffs at the dawn of “Teenage Riot,” after Kim Gordon’s vocals settled like dust, playing faintly in the background of a Perks of Being a Wallflower scene. Upon further investigation and a proper, full-volume listen, my brain, ears and hands couldn’t stop remembering those notes.

More than a decade later, upon plunging into Flow Critical Lucidity, all those incidental noises, bleeding pianos, brush-played drums and discordant tones told through flourishes of stripped down guitars made me feel like an impressionable teenager again. As the chords surf and surge on “Hypnogram,” stretch out on “Rewilding” and then crescendo on “The Diver,” it all sounds like a 66-year-old learning something new not just about himself, but about the musicians he’s surrounded himself with, be it through on-the-fly experimenting or through romantic, inexplicable happenstance. Once upon a time, after mingling with Rhode Island School of Design students and starting Sonic Youth, Moore played almost exclusively in standard tuning. Then, after 1981, he and Ranaldo began radicalizing their guitars out of a necessity that swirled into a livelihood. “It became more of an adventure,” he concludes, “but it wasn’t for any other reason except we all of a sudden found ourselves with these guitars that were really cheap and couldn’t really hold traditional tunings. But, they sounded great with a drumstick underneath the strings.”

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.