Exclusive Stream: Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo Makes His Solo Debut
Lee Ranaldo has spent the past three decades building a body of work that includes his work as a member of Sonic Youth and a variety of experimental side projects, but Between the Times and the Tides marks the guitarist’s first album as a solo singer-songwriter. “Over the summer I pulled out a bunch of my acoustic guitars and was just fooling around, and a whole bunch of songs just started generating, just kind of out of nowhere,” Ranaldo told Rolling Stone last year. “What was refreshing about this was just to see all these songs sprout and actually kind of follow each other down this road and actually get completed.”
Whereas Ranaldo has traditionally contributed only one or two songs per Sonic Youth record, Between gives him space to explore musical tangents that would not necessarily fit in with that band, such as the straight-up folk rock of the single “Off the Wall” or the spare acoustic ballad “Stranded.” The album will be in stores on March 20th, but you can stream it in full today on Spotify.