The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

I was walking around Smith College today taking photos of myself hanging out with the trees,” says an exuberant Thurston Moore. He’s driving down Route 91 from Massachusetts to New York with a mobile phone glued to his ear. “It’s an all women’s college in the neighbourhood where I live. Sylvia Plath went to school there. It’s where she used to stay up all night listening to the screams from the mental institution a mile down the road and, according to legend, she used to make love with some of the local professors in the backyard of our house.”

Moore has taken to photographing himself with plant life in honour of the release of his second solo album, Trees Outside The Academy, named after the very institution where a young Ms Plath wondered how she might have her wicked way with unsuspecting lecturers. It’s a fitting title given Moore’s own interests and outspoken views on poetry and feminism. His current hobby/obsession is archiving underground late sixties and early seventies mimeo poetry from the UK and US, fact fans.

Unlike its 1995 predecessor, Psychic Hearts, which was written and recorded in the run up to the birth of his first and only child with wife and fellow Sonic Youth bandmate, Kim Gordon, Moore’s latest long-player is a coming-of-age-record of sorts. Psychic Hearts, with all the musical dirge and cryptic lyrics a post-rock grunge world had to offer, was a product of its time. On Trees Outside The Academy, Moore displays a more mature string to his bow; moving closer to structured songwriting and away from the catastrophic collection of improvised sounds and noises that define Psychic Hearts.

Recorded at the nearby third-floor home studio of his friend J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr, and out on Moore’s own Ecstatic Peace! label, Trees Outside The Academy is an exceptionally considered and poignant LP. From the delicate acoustic guitar plucking and strumming provided by Moore, to the perspicacious strings of violinist Samara Lubelski and fragility of vocalist Christina Carter of Charalambides, here is an album clearly designed to show off a more personal side to Moore.

‘Honest James’ and a song called ‘Wonderful Witches’ - they’re my favourites because they have such an immediacy to them and I always feel like I need to hear that on a record sometimes,” says Moore. “I need to hear that happening, because mostly records are so controlled and composed. I was gonna do different things on this album - I was gonna do skits and I was gonna have more noise extrapolation stuff - but I kind of honed it down primarily to just the songs.”

Moore also seems to have taken a turn from the lyrical path he set out on with Psychic Hearts, possibly as a result of his fascination with beat poetry.

I tend to write lyrics in different ways,” he explains. “I like lyrics to be evocative to myself as well as to whoever may be listening to them. I generally struggle with writing lyrics: I will either go through periods where I will write a lot of poetry down and then I’ll try and adapt the poems into lyrics that fit into songs. Sometimes the written poem will just work as a song: I don’t have to do anything - it just works and it will open the song up. In a way, I feel like I construct musical ideas like I construct lyrical ideas. I wanna keep the words having the same sort of energy as the music. But I’m not interested in singing gobbledegook.”

Listening to tracks like ‘Honest James’ or ‘Silver>Blue’ will definitely surprise some Sonic Youth enthusiasts, even if the inclusion of ‘Thurston@13’ - a recording Moore made of himself as an adolescent playing around with household objects - proves he still has that itching to take on the unusual and experimental. It’s more that, with Trees Outside The Academy, he’s written an album that could only be a solo album.

Every time I try and make a solo record, I end up making a Sonic Youth record,” continues Moore. “For me, the most successful manifestation of my songs is when Kim, Lee [Ranaldo] and Steve [Shelly] do it with me and it turns into something else. It turns into a really unified songwriting democracy. When I do a solo record, it’s a dictatorship. It’s me calling the shots, but I’m not really much of a dictator.”

Mt was in fact Moore’s collaborators and friends who were instrumental in ensuring Trees Outside The Academy came about as it is, and didn’t remain an abstract idea. They pushed him into recording it because he has his misgivings about his ability. He may be the father of alternative rock, but he freely admits his guitar playing is anything but professional.

Psychic Hearts was all about the initial structure of the song idea,” he says. “It was very minimal - electric guitar and drums and I did all the bass and overdubs. It was supposed to be this very simple rock record that I was hoping would be pretty artful or pretty art-schooly. This record is quite an older record, because I’m a different player now. A lot of the songs on the last two Sonic Youth albums originated as acoustic guitar tracks and I was always getting encouragement from people I know who said that I should really do an acoustic guitar album. I thought that might be a little audacious, because I’m not really that good a guitar player. I don’t really know how to play the guitar. So I kind of made up my own rules on this. I know some of the chords and stuff and I know some of the concepts involved, but I don’t really know how to fucking play.”

Moore may consider himself a musical charlatan, but there’s no escaping his impressive body of work, as a solo artist and a member of Sonic Youth. His label can also be credited with helping bands like Magik Markers, Be Your Own Pet, Wooden Wand and many others rise to greater prominence. He’s leaving a mighty legacy and he shows no signs of slowing down. “To be brutally honest, with this album, I really was making it up as I went along,” he says, laughing. “That’s what I always do.”

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