Thurston Moore’s New Day: Inside His Upbeat Rock & Roll Solo Album
“Playing with this group made me want to create something really positive, because the music was really positive,” Thurston Moore says. “Originally, the working title was Detonation, which has a different vibe to it.” He laughs.
The group that put Moore on the path to positivity features Nought guitarist James Sedwards, My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley. Together, they made a record that pits lush, anxious guitar lines against propulsive post-punk rhythms in a surprisingly direct manner, uncovering the essence of his Sonic Youth recordings while keeping experimental tangents to a minimum. Songs like the intensely romantic “Forevermore,” darkly acoustic “Vocabularies” and indie rocker “The Best Day” present Moore in his most refined state.
The album cover features a picture Moore’s father took of his mother swimming with her dog in a lake in the 1940s. “I called it The Best Day,” he says. “It was this idea of trying to extol some positivity into releasing this record.”
Rolling Stone recently caught up with the singer-songwriter, who has been living in London for the past year, to find out how The Best Day came together. He also discussed the reaction he got to comments he made about black metal while promoting Caught on Tape – Full Bleed, the noise record he made with drummer John Moloney that’s slated for early next year and how he’s adjusted to life as an Englishman. “I had this fantasy in ’78 of going either to London or Los Angeles because I felt it fit my 18-year-old musical dream better than New York, where I eventually settled,” he says with a laugh. “Now I got to London.”
How did the band on The Best Day come together?
When I moved here, one of the first places I lived was in this shared flat, and there were all musicians there. One of them was this guitarist who was teaching kids how to play Led Zeppelin riffs. I was really kind of intrigued by that. When I met him he was this really sweet, gentle Englishman, James Sedwards. I just would talk about music with him late into the night. And he’s really into high-technique guitar playing, which is something I don’t really have much interest in. But at the same time, his favorite bands are the Fall and My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth, and things like this. He likes more of that rough, marginalized sound [laughs]. But also, he’s a total shredder.
I was just starting to write some solo songs and thinking about playing with some musicians here. And I facetiously started a band called Thurston Moore U.K., and I called him because he seemed like the right guy for the job. I just showed him some of my rudimentary song ideas, and he got it immediately. And we just started playing duos around London.
How did Steve Shelley and Debbie Googe get involved?
Lee Ranaldo’s band with Steve Shelley and Alan Licht played a club here called the Garage. It’s a place that I played in the past with Sonic Youth, so I asked Lee if I could open up with this duo and we played this instrumental music that I had written. And Steve Shelley was into it and said if we needed a drummer to play on this stuff, he would fly over. I said, “Well, that’s great.” So I kept that in mind.
And James one day said, “I have an idea for the perfect bass player: Deb Googe from My Bloody Valentine.” She’s not doing anything these days, because My Bloody Valentine pretty much ran through their reunion gigs for the last couple years and had been in a place of hiatus. I thought that was a good idea.
I know Deb from when Sonic Youth used to play with My Bloody Valentine. In fact, we played with them when they first started, really early on, in Scotland, when they were first what you might call a “shoegaze” band, before they became sort of Dinosaur Jr.-ized and started buying Jazzmasters and playing at high volume and blaring all these beautiful music and ideas together and created their masterpieces. I never saw that coming.
Did you write the songs on The Best Day with these musicians in mind or were you just writing what came out?
I was writing how I was feeling without thinking so much of what other musicians I would play with. But I certainly knew that Steve would be completely perfect for it, only because Steve and I have such ESP through so many years of playing together. James proves to himself to be the perfect person, as well. And when Deb and Steve locked in together, I knew right away it was really rock & roll magic. It was immediately astounding to me, and it opened up the songs in a way I was unprepared for. It encouraged me to write lyrics that I think were a lot stronger than I probably would’ve.