A little Moore conversation

Another day, another couple of Thurston Moore interviews - one with Drowned In Sound's Dom Gourlay and one with the Guardian's Dorian Lynskey. Both are worth a read despite broadly covering similar (and obvious ground): life after Sonic Youth, the move to London, the new solo album The Best Day.

While Gourlay's questions tiptoe sensitively around the issue of Moore's split with Kim Gordon, Lynskey gently probes the subject, his interviewee admitting to finding the public fall-out (including being savaged by Jezebel) "embarrassing" and "humiliating", but otherwise remaining fairly tight-lipped: "Nothing about it was pretty. At all. It’s really intense and heavy on both sides".

He tells Gourlay that The Best Day was originally set to be twice the length and include "some other solo pieces, some noise improv things" as well as some unreleased Chelsea Light Moving recordings, but was (probably wisely) pared down and focused for release. He's already thinking about doing things differently for the next album, not least because he now has a settled line-up (Steve Shelley, Deb Googe and James Sedwards) alongside him: "I want the next record to get into more expansive places about what a song can be".

While Chelsea Light Moving are no more, described as merely a "transitional project" with a definite "shelf life", the prospect of a Sonic Youth reunion is hinted at: "There's no paperwork that says we can't exist in the future". You'd have thought the divorce would make that very difficult and unlikely, and indeed Moore echoes his ex-wife's sentiment by implying that Sonic Youth would probably have split in any case: "It probably sounded like Sonic Youth was making records for the sake of making records. I felt that the audience had reached a place of complacency where we were decoded. That edge of wonder and surprise had all but disappeared. A lot of what we developed over the years has seeped its way into music culture. We weren’t the radical band any more; we were more of a radical reference point. I was getting a little bored with people getting bored with us". I do take his point to an extent - but The Eternal remains one of my absolute favourite Sonic Youth albums, and doesn't (to me) sound like a band running out of steam.