Focus on Thurston Moore – Who is he ?

Early life and Sonic Youth years

Thurston Moore is born Thurston Joseph Moore on July 25 1958 in Florida. He followed his family to Connecticut when he was 8. Then he moved alone to NYC at 18 in 1976 to play punk.

In 1980 he met Kim Gordon and moved in with her. Shortly after “The Coachmen”’s breakup Moore went on to form Sonic Youth along with her as a bassist. Then Lee Ranaldo (guitar) and Steve Shelley (drums) joined the band and they probably did not expect their collaboration would lead them to more than 30 fruitful years of tours, albums, collaborations and side projects. In the meantime Moore and Gordon had a daughter called “Coco Hayley Moore” in 1994.

The double split

In 2011 Thurston and Kim announced they had separated and shortly after Lee announced the indefinite break of Sonic Youth. It turned out that Thurston had extramarital relationship with art book editor Eva Prinz for around 6 years, which probably means that some lyrics of the last albums of Sonic Youth were most likely influenced by a muse other than the band’s fans thought it was as Kim mentioned in her book “Girl in a band”. Thurston said

“I’m in a really romantic place with Eva; we’ve kinda been a couple for close to six years. A lot of those years, nobody was very aware of it except us. The cat’s been out of the bag a while now.”

On her side Kim Gordon described it differently:

“We seemed to have a normal relationship inside of a crazy world. And in fact, it ended in a kind of normal way : midlife crisis, starstruck woman.”

Thurston Moore barely responded to solicitations but gave some hints of his personal inner demons and of how he deals with it:

“I’ve had some life issues. In your 40s and 50s things can change in ways that upset the order of things that have been established over 25 years-plus of marriage. It’s really distressing. You have to work through it, it’s very personal and I don’t really talk about it so much. It’s just something I work through in my own world… I’m involved in a really sweet relationship, and it really does make me happy; it truly does. But I’ll always have that experience of sadness that a separation brings, especially one that was as important, not just to me but everybody around us. There have been some fall-outs, but that’s to be expected. It’s pretty heavy. ”

Should he be blamed for what happened? Well, Sonic Youth would probably still be delighting us if Kim and him were still together. But one never knows what’s exactly going on within a couple so I would not personally blame him for that. I would just regret all the harm it has been for Kim (and I guess their daughter Coco) and the ending of one of the last emblematic couple of the the indie rock stage.

New life

After that sort of double split Thurston Moore started a new band called “Chelsea Light Moving”, made various appearances and presently records and tours both solo, with various ensembles and with his own band. His most recent recordings are “The Best Day” released by Matador Records in 2014 and “Rock n Roll Consciousness” released in April featuring Steve, his old fella from Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine’s Debbie Googe.
Thurston resides now in London where he met his neighbor and current lead guitarist “James Sedwards”.

Global artistic approach

Thurston Moore is not only a singer, songwriter and guitarist.
He edited the music and literary fanzines KILLER, Sonic Death, Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal and started the Ecstatic Peace record label that released noteworthy artists like “be your own PET” and “Free kitten”.
He is senior editor of Ecstatic Peace Library, the poetry imprint Flowers & Cream and has edited books at Rizzoli and Abrams. He has been on faculty at the Naropa University summer writing program since 2011.His own writings have been published through various imprints.

He has worked collaboratively with Yoko Ono, Merce Cunningham, Cecil Taylor, Rhys Chatham, Lydia Lunch, John Zorn, Takehisa Kosugi and Glenn Branca. He has composed music for films by Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, and Allison Anders.

So Thurston Moore is a great guitarist/songwriter with an interest in all forms of art.