Thurston Moore is done pretending he’s not a lifer. That much is clear the second he opens his mouth to talk about By the Fire, his sprawling solo album that stitches together decades of noise, beauty, and all the exploratory spirit of Sonic Youth—without the safety net of a band name. “I probably had enough from one session to make a pretty solid single album,” he says, “but I wanted something bigger. The world’s bigger now. And messier.”
So he made his own Exile on Main Street—a patchwork of multiple sessions, studios, and moods, from jangle to drone to full-tilt rock-out. “It starts out kind of with these sonic rock tunes… then it gets a little more contemplative. I wanted this record to be slightly bigger and have a story,” Moore explains. But don’t expect a concept album. “It’s not a rock opera,” he laughs.
For a guy whose former band became synonymous with guitar deconstruction, Moore now seems surprisingly okay with straightforward melody—even the occasional guitar solo. One track, “Cantaloupe,” stops you cold with a classic shred moment. “That’s not me,” Moore insists. “That’s James Edwards. His favorite guitarists are Jimmy Page and Lydia Lunch. He’s a shredder with a head full of weird.” Did Moore ever imagine himself greenlighting a Jimmy Page-style solo in the middle of one of his records? “Maybe I would’ve run from it at one point. But I’ve always loved hot rock-and-roll playing,” he says. “We just didn’t do that in Sonic Youth.”
Still, you can’t escape your own ghosts. “Hashish,” with its hypnotic chug and familiar dissonance, could’ve walked off Daydream Nation wearing sunglasses. “People said it sounds like ‘Sunday,’” Moore admits. “Of course it does. That’s my language. It’s my tongue. I like recognizability. That’s why I like country and reggae—because it all sounds the same.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s repeating himself. If anything, By the Fire is a continuation of a decades-long experiment: can you stretch the boundaries of a four-piece rock band without throwing out the rulebook? “I’m still in apprenticeship,” he says. “I’ve never finished investigating this.”
He’s also well aware of the climate this record was released into—social, political, ecological. The title By the Fire isn’t just about warmth. “I'm standing beside a very big fire right now,” he says, referencing America in flames. “And there’s so much whack energy out there. I wanted to put something into the world that had good energy. That was the political move.”
Moore isn’t just talking about vibes—he names names. He’s already voted overseas and is rooting for the faction that will let “Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Bernie Sanders” through the front door. “We’re not really dealing with politics anymore,” he says. “We’re dealing with something criminal. A racist landlord is running the country.”
It’s not a new fight for Moore. “Sonic Youth always tried to be active. But it’s different now. It used to be about political cycles—Reagan, Bush. Now it’s about the hijacking of the entire structure. We were dealing with ecological issues back in the ’70s as kids. Now it’s not theoretical anymore—it’s knocking on your front door.”
When touring got shut down by the pandemic, Moore finally started writing Sonic Life, a memoir that goes long on the why of making music rather than the what happened when. “I wanted to write about the things that made me want to be a musician in the first place,” he says, citing Patti Smith’s Hey Joe/Piss Factory 7-inch as a life-changer. “It was raw. It was shocking. And it came with no photo on the sleeve.”
Like By the Fire, the book isn’t about polish or perfection. It’s about the documents, the totems, the spark that makes a suburban teen pick up a guitar and never put it down. “If Lester Bangs had made a record in ’73,” Moore says, “I would’ve been on top of it. His voice had the same energy as Iggy Pop’s.”
Now Moore is that voice. Still shredding. Still droning. Still fighting. Still by the fire.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
