What I really wanted to do was just write; I find such joy in writing. It’s the same joy that I find in making music. I’ve always given equal value to both of those disciplines. I’ve written and published poetry for the last thirty years, edit[ed] poetry journals, and I’ve done some music essaying here and there.

I’ve always been sort of a frustrated music journalist since the 1970s. Writing about music was inspired by music writers like early Patti Smith — before she was a recording artist — or Lester Bangs or Richard Meltzer and these kinds of gonzo writers. A lot of what I was reading in the British music papers in the ’70s [was by] scribes [who] were really very influential as writers, and the writing was as important to me as what they were writing about. Lester Bangs was as interesting to me as Lou Reed was.

In that respect, the fact that people like Lou Reed considered themselves writers was a model for me, and he left the music world for a period in the 1970s thinking he was just going to focus on being a poet. That didn’t really last long, but I always thought that was probably a really genuine feeling for him.

I knew that writing a memoir would be a fairly easy sell! By using a book agent and saying I wanted to write a Sonic Youth memoir. I knew that I didn’t want to write too much about my own internal life; I wanted to write about what were the signifiers of my life that I shared with so many other people who got into music as a vocation in the late 1970s.

And being inspired by the whole shake-up of punk rock that was going on, which I really felt defined by. I wanted to write about the different magazines, books, my love for New York City. At the time I wasn’t really loving New York City or anything, though — it just happened to be where I was living. It could have been anywhere and the whole mythos of New York City as an incubator of creative impulse is something I’ve been resistant to talk about because it could happen anywhere. It could happen in Cardiff.

I kind of always think about what my father would have thought about my life. And I try to consider that. I knew that my father specifically, more than my mother, was quite a unique individual in contrast to most of the other parental figures in my rural Connecticut neighbourhood. Most houses I would visit as a youth didn’t have libraries or music — it was just television sets and fro- zen dinners. In a real way, it really surprised me when I started going to visit other people’s places and realising that we were rather different in that respect. I knew that it always had this value.

My father was a curious intellectual. He still was a child of the 1930s. He was a little confounded, though, by why I would have images of shirtless male rock stars on my walls or [by] whether his son had a homosexual persuasion, and I just wouldn’t have thought about that as something I had to be wary about. I don’t think he considered rock ’n’ roll music to be of any value in comparison to his love for the classical canon; he thought it was a load of caterwaul. But if he had lived past the era of ’76, he would have — maybe in discussion with myself — had some realisation about so much of the intellectual rigour that existed behind rock ’n’ roll music.

I regret not being more aware of what that world was in the late ’70s and ’80s. I didn’t get as involved with the culture of poetry until sometime in the 1990s. A lot of it had to do with the practice of it. What I realised was that there was this total subterranean world of publishing, where the documents were being exchanged.

There was this post-war rearrangement of what poetry was, and it was spurred on by people like Alan Ginsberg, who was travelling the world at all times and constantly pontificating about how poetry was the news of the world — really liberating the form. In some ways, what drew me in was the practice of it. That people had been, since the early 1960s, sharing this very economic means of exchange and expression with poetry journals and production. It was what I was interested in with punk rock. A people’s music where the product was made at home on the kitchen table.

The aesthetics of music I feel like I have decoded, to a degree, and what I really want to read are the documents. The physicality and vibrational aspect of the artwork and what’s going on around all of that production. Listening to the recording now is kind of the last thing I’m interested in! Even though I do enjoy it.

Oh yeah. I was pretty privileged in that I could run off to my mother’s house in Connecticut and maybe she would give me $20 on the way out. It’s not like she had any great amount of money at her dis- posal though. Everybody was wondering how they were going to put food on the table. But I always had some feeling that I would never be utterly or complet- ely destitute. Musicians like James Chance or Lydia Lunch, I could see that they weren’t able to survive any which way unless they could find a few dollars each day to get through.

At the same time, I didn’t have any money in my pocket for the most part, and I knew that the only way to be self-sufficient was to work day jobs. But it was begrudgingly. It not only got in the way of my aspirations of being a musician or writer, but it disturbed my feeling of wanting to be lost in daydreams, you know?

I still have that feeling in my life that I want to be insisting on this feeling of daydreaming. I equate it with some kind of sense of meditation — this desire for meditation as a holistic exercise. To be able to run away from the societal stresses of daily life and to be able to run free from that. It’s completely irresponsible. But I also understood responsibility, so I would get work in. Especially when I got into a relationship and had a child. But when I get a teaching gig, or somebody wants me to produce a record, it’s like I have to go to work or go to school.

I find the streaming economy to be completely insidious. It really has nothing to do with supporting the demographic of people working as artists. Because it can. The people who create the services are all about monetising the work of musicians where it puts the musician last in the chain. It’s not unlike in other industries, but there’s something very intangible about music as work for most people who deal in the system of making money.

The commodification of music — where it doesn’t honour the creative source of it in a way that is respectful — is constantly jarring and annoying. You can only fight against it. I don’t support it; I don’t stream music; I stay off of all streaming services. Outside of my own independent releases, any music I release is on Spotify so it becomes a matter of course.

And in some ways, I don’t really demonise the proprietors of Spotify. It might just be because it’s my specific interest in how I want to hear things, but a lot of it is political and that I won’t support that system. It’s like being anti-police to me: would you hire the police to help safeguard your health and your home? Maybe there’s alternatives to that.

At the time I felt that there was no aesthetic relationship there. It was about being serviced by having your recordings distributed with a wider net and having actual cogent accounting as opposed to a handshake. I thought that was a good idea, and I also thought — especially being a band in North America — the corporate structure allowed musicians to have access to a healthcare plan. The only thing that alleviates healthcare in the US is having a healthcare plan. It’s a very nefarious set-up in the USA, the fact that we don’t have socialised healthcare. Signing to a corporate label allowed each of us to acquire that, which was kind of the biggest selling point.

That did come with the anxiety of knowing that we would be diffused by being on a corporate label in a way that I felt had happened to bands [that] were contemporaries of ours, like Hüsker Dü. I felt it affected my perception of a band — when they signed to Warner Bros., they made the same kind of message they would have made on [record label] SST, but it was somewhat defanged by coming out on a major label. Wanting to have that document in your collection just wasn’t very attractive.

It was a very political division between [be- ing with a major label] and working in complete independen[ce] outside of the major industry. For our first major label release Goo in 1991, we purposely used Raymond Pettibon, who was really acquainted with the underground that we came out of, for the art — we were going to drag Raymond Pettibon with us into this realm and see what [would] happen, and kind of radicalise the mainstream, which was what we thought we were going to do.

Maybe we did a little bit, but it didn’t really matter. It defused our presence in the underground a little, defanged it a bit — and I didn’t really appreciate that so much, but I knew that was something we had to swallow to go forward. When Nirvana’s Nevermind went supernova beyond any sales coming out of the independent world, to the point where it is now as successful as a Beatles record, that really changed everything as far as any perception between the relationship bet- ween being on a major or [being] an independent. There was suddenly a model of success where a band was true to its own existence and founded in the under- ground, but selling millions and millions of records.

Of course, there were stalwarts saying you can’t sign to a major because they disrespect bands and spend your money. I used to fight against that and say that if you’re aware what’s going on, you should be able to see where all the decimal points are. In some ways I thought that was rather incriminating towards the poor little independent band being screwed by the labels — don’t be stupid going into those situations. You can go into situations and be aware; make sure that you’re not getting some old bluesman contract.

I like being slightly alien in the culture. I always think about where to live in a place that actually has the most left-leaning, humanitarian intellectual climate that I can feel safe in. I think about the differ- ent places in Europe, and Europe is going so pro-nationalist and right wing in every country that it’s just frightening. I think of how astounding and beautiful the cultures are in Italy or France or the Netherlands, and these are three countries that are really getting under the wings of really insidious leadership now.

It frightens me. I try and stay aloof from British politics but I’m aware of it. I get most of my information from reading Stewart Lee, which I think is a good place to start! I really love living here. I’m a huge book collector. My wife is a book pub- lisher and our house is rammed with books. The metropolitan areas of England like London or Newcastle or Manchester or Bristol — people actually read and buy books here. Much more so than where I come from in the USA.