Thurston Moore finds his best day

On the cover of Thurston Moore's new album

The Best Day

, a lovely woman wearing a bathing cap is up to her elbows in a large lake's waters. She adoringly stares into a camera's lens and cradles her dog, who also happens to be facing the photographer: You immediately sense tenderness, devotion.

The subject is Moore's mom and pooch, the shooter Moore's dad, and the idea of using that family photo for the onetime (maybe still, no one knows) Sonic Youth guitarist/singer comes down to how love is conveyed on this, his version of one's best day.

"They were young, in love, and newly married, the sun was shining, they had everything ahead of them," Moore says from his new home in England. "That just seemed so perfect to me - a best day. Plus, I was originally going to call the album Detonation, but that didn't work for what I was feeling. The Best Day did. I felt a certain responsibility to represent something that had a nature of positivity, especially in the climate of terror that we live in globally. I think that's a better idea than the negative, so I went with that."

Moore has never been one to readily radiate romance's values. "I would never write so that I would nakedly convey who I was inside, that isn't me," he says. His lyrics within and outside of Sonic Youth telegraph nervous tension, while his lo-fi, musical mix of noise and jangle is as crotchety as it was at his start. His next album is Full Bleed, a black-metal collaboration with drummer John Maloney.

Yet, recent events in Moore's life have perhaps shaken him to his core, made him reassess, and open up: He fell in love with book editor Eva Prinz while married to fellow Youth member Kim Gordon, ending the marriage and putting Sonic Youth into sleep mode. He moved from his cherished New York City and Connecticut to Stoke Newington in London, a place he always dreamed of living ("I thought I could hang there with my favorite bands like Public Image Ltd."), and found a band of mostly Brits like My Bloody Valentine's bassist Debbie Googe to back him in what turns out to be Moore's boldest solo album yet. Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley is Moore's drummer, almost like a child of divorce as he also plays with the Youth's Lee Ranaldo. "The fact that Kim and I have gone through a separation affects everything," Moore says. "It's hard for us to work together right now. We don't know what that future is. We're not really talking about it. But my communication with Steve and Lee always remains friendly and constructive."

The new and open brightness in Moore's sound now isn't so much about positive, shifting circumstances, even if he does admit to letting new love crawl into his lyrics at present. Instead, The Best Day connects English historical mythology to the holiness of eternal bliss (particularly on "Forevermore") and explodes authoritarian figures on "Detonation" and "Speak to the Wild" like a wiggier Sonic Youth. He doesn't mind that comparison. It's who he was and still is: "I'm bound to sound like that." There just happens to be more to who Moore is, as the musician we've known him to be and the man we never guessed about. "There is, on The Best Day, an embracement of excitement, as well as a consideration of the reality of any melancholy that we have with the world."

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