Sonic Youth Reissues Due

Sonic Youth will see three of their albums given the remaster and reissue treatment later this year by Universal. The three albums targeted for reissue are the band's sixth, seventh and eighth: 1988's Daydream Nation, 1990's Goo and 1992's Dirty. In addition to the remastering, each album will be repackaged as a two-disc set, with the second disc comprising demos, live songs, outtakes and B-sides.

The reissues are just one of a flurry of Sonic Youth-related releases set for the coming year. Previously released Sonic Youth videos, Screaming Fields of Sonic Love (1995), The Goo That Lives On in My Heart (1990) and 1991: The Year Punk Broke (1993), will be issued on DVD for the first time later this year. The band is currently pouring through additional film footage that will be included at bonus goodies on those releases.

This spring the group will also release tracks taken from a spring 2000 session in Paris with Seventies French avant-pop singer Brigitte Fontaine and her longtime collaborator Areski. The album will be released on the group's SYR label.

And Sonic Youth are still working on their next album, which they had hoped to have in stores prior to the March 14th kickoff of the All Tomorrow's Parties Festival in Los Angeles, which the band is curating. The album, the sessions for which were interrupted by September 11th, will be the group's first as a five-piece, as Chicago musician/producer Jim O'Rourke has joined the lineup. According to guitarist/vocalist Thurston Moore, the group has a few tracks ready to go, including "Disconnection" and "Empty Page," but the album is still without a working title. "The music has a certain profundity to it, to us," he says. "Especially with the activities going on right now in our lives. There's less kind of straight up weirdness to it although we're still working a lot with unorthodox tunings et cetera. I think more fleshed out kind of classic rock material [laughs] is more what it's like in away. But it's not boring, I think it's still challenging as far as a listener would go."

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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