SHELLEY: Just sometimes when they say "no", you know that may not be the final "no" (laughing). Sometimes we know that we actually can do this if we can persuade the right person, so that's one aspect of it.

RANALDO: We've always been kind of involved enough in the business of making records and how it all operates; we've always been interested in it, so maybe we know more about that stuff as a group then your average musician does. And certainly having gone through all the labels that we've gone through, we've always kept on top of how they operate and what's possible and what's not possible and how that works.

Sonic Youth Records

STARPOLISH: What's the idea behind having your own label? Many times artists' labels are regarded as vanity labels, and other times the reasons are quite different. For example, some bands I've talked to say that there are a lot of great bands who can't get signed to a deal and it's a way to help get their music out, while for other artists it's that they have so much creative output that they couldn't feed it through the normal distribution pipeline. Can you talk about your label?

RANALDO: All of the above makes sense for what we do. The SYR label is a label that's run by the band as a collective, and it's mostly recordings that we wouldn't want to make Geffen have to deal with. And it's for those times when you don't want to put out an album a year or an album every nine months with a major label. So we can slip something out on an independent label, and not overtax the major label system that you have working for you. And it's also usually recordings that maybe they wouldn't understand or that they wouldn't know how to market or sell, while we can kind of just slip it out, and fans who like the band and want to have that stuff, they know how to get it.

STARPOLISH: Do you have distribution?

RANALDO: Yeah. We have excellent distribution. It goes through a company called Revolver USA out of San Francisco and they distribute thousands of independent record labels. So that's one aspect of what our record label is. We haven't gotten too into putting out other artists, but it's always a possibility. We really haven't done much with a label in the last year or so because we've been working on our new album for Geffen. But probably in the next year we'll do a number of releases and put some things out.

STARPOLISH: By the way, I have to ask you, since I have the pre-release: is the album called Nurse, or Sonic Youth Nurse?

RANALDO: It's Sonic Nurse .

SHELLEY: It's partially our fault because we changed the name from Sonic Youth Nurse to Sonic Nurse . It's never been just Nurse, but it's kind of confusing.