Sonic Youth To Release Live Album Of Final New York Show 'Live In Brooklyn 2011' In August
Wednesday, 21 June 2023
Written by Jon Stickler
Sonic Youth have announced a live album of their final North American concert.
The New York band played their last hometown concert at Williamsburg Waterfront on August 12, 2011, before confirming their breakup a few months later.
The 17-set performance was recorded and released via Bandcamp during the COVID-19 lockdown, and will be remixed and remastered for an official release on vinyl, CD, and cassette tape for the first time as 'Live In Brooklyn 2011' on August 18. Drummer Steve Shelley said:
"This show was a culmination of a run of really special outdoor summertime shows in New York City for us, starting in ’92 with SummerStage in Central Park when we played with Sun Ra. For the Williamsburg Waterfront show I wrote out the set list to present to the band and it was a lot of material we hadn’t played in a while, a lot of deep cuts, so I wasn’t sure if everybody would feel like doing it. After worrying about which songs the band might say yes or no to, I threw those concerns out the window and I just made a list of songs that I thought would be a great set. We practiced the week of the show at our space in Hoboken and put the set together. First we’d try and make sure we had a guitar in the song’s tuning, then we’d try to remember the arrangement and try and put it together, sometimes re-learning bar by bar. In the end I think the whole song list made it through. Even as early as ’86 and ’87 we stopped playing ‘Death Valley 69’ and ‘Brave Men Run’ with any regularity. We’d just get excited about new material coming into the set and songs would get ‘retired’ and wouldn’t get played again for years. So on this particular night in Brooklyn a lot of those retired songs and deep cuts got dusted off and played for this show. It turned out to be a pretty special event with a really special song list."
Sonic Youth split following the announcement that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore were ending their 27-year marriage. Since then, Gordon, Moore and guitarist and vocalist Lee Ranaldo have all pursued solo projects.
'Live In Brooklyn 2011' tracklist:
1. Brave Men Run (In My Family)
2. Death Valley '69
3. Kotton Krown
4. Kill Yr Idols
5. Eric's Trip
6. Sacred Trickster
7. Calming The Snake
8. Starfield Road
9. I Love Her All The Time
10. Ghost Bitch
11. Tom Violence
12. What We Know
13. Drunken Butterfly
14. Flower
15. Sugar Kane
16. Psychic Hearts
17. Inhuman
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