When Thurston Moore was 10 years old, his family relocated from South Miami, Florida, to Bethel, Connecticut. His father taught art appreciation, philosophy, humanities and phenomenology at Western Connecticut State University, and it soon became clear to Moore that his upbringing was unlike those of his peers in the suburban town.

“When I started going to other houses of people my age and not seeing books or records or a piano or whatever, I was like, ‘Where is it? Where’s your stuff? Where are all these evocations of other worlds?’ ” Moore, 65, recalled during a recent interview.

The stuff of culture is important to Moore, who in 1981 helped found the arty, unconventionally tuned guitar band Sonic Youth. Those who know Moore describe him as someone with a boundless enthusiasm for music and other artistic endeavors.

“One of the things that struck me when I met him is that he’d retained something childlike about creativity,” said Beck, who toured with Sonic Youth in 1995 and produced Moore’s 2011 solo acoustic album, “Demolished Thoughts.”

“Whatever that instinct is, it doesn’t usually survive adulthood,” he added.

“He’s an encyclopedia of underground rock,” said Jemina Pearl, the singer for the Nashville punk band Be Your Own Pet, which released its self-titled debut on Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label in 2006. “He’s the opposite of a gatekeeper. He loves to share music and knowledge and art.”

Steve Shelley, Sonic Youth’s drummer from 1985 until the band’s 2011 end, said he missed the “constant barrage of new information” about music and literature coming from Moore’s direction.

Moore has recently published his memoir, “Sonic Life,” via Doubleday. The book begins on the 1963 day that his brother, Gene, brought home a 7-inch of the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” providing Moore with what he called his “first visceral thrill of rock ’n’ roll.” In late 1976, Moore and his best friend, Harold Paris, drove an hour and a half to the New York City club Max’s Kansas City, where they witnessed a wild punk show by the Cramps and Suicide.

They were hooked, commuting regularly to Max’s and elsewhere to see the Dead Boys, the Ramones, Patti Smith and countless others. In 1978, he moved to New York City.

In 1980, Moore was introduced to Kim Gordon at a show by his group the Coachmen. The two became a couple, then bandmates in Sonic Youth. (They wed in 1984 and later had a daughter, Coco Gordon Moore, 29, an artist, poet and model.) Though the band had a number of different lineups over the years, the most consistent saw Moore on guitar and vocals; Gordon on bass, guitar and vocals; Lee Ranaldo on guitar and vocals; and Shelley on drums.

Sonic Youth released 15 or 16 studio albums (depending how you count), including the 1988 double-LP “Daydream Nation” and the band’s 1990 major-label debut, “Goo,” with a cover featuring an iconic Raymond Pettibon illustration.

Despite the band’s renown, Moore said that writing the book, he “tried to really be sensitive to any kind of backslapping accolades,” preferring “to focus on the other musicians, the other bands, which allowed me to get away from like, ‘Oh, didn’t I create something amazing?’ ”

That’s in keeping with what Dave Markey, director of the documentary “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” said was Moore’s driving force: “It seemed like Thurston had a mission, and the mission was pushing music forward, whether it was his own or other people’s.” The film captures Sonic Youth’s European tour with hand-picked openers Nirvana, just before the release of the grunge band’s era-defining blockbuster “Nevermind.” “His intuitive sense of what was happening really came to a head with Nirvana,” Markey added.

But Moore mostly keeps to himself in “Sonic Life” — by design. He described the process of writing his memoir as one driven by the desire to share historical “data.” (A lot of data: He estimated that the submitted manuscript came in about three times as long as the nearly 500-page finished product.) “I certainly didn’t want this book to be some kind of personal expose,” he said.

In October 2011, Sonic Youth’s label made the surprise announcement that Moore and Gordon had separated after 27 years of marriage. The band played its last shows, in South America, shortly thereafter, and effectively broke up. In the book, Moore shares a bare-bones version of what transpired — he had fallen in love with Eva Prinz, a book editor. It’s a stark contrast to Gordon’s detailed recounting of the events surrounding the affair in her own memoir, “Girl in a Band” from 2015.

“I didn’t take any umbrage with it,” Moore said of Gordon’s revelatory bestseller, which he read years ago. “But it’s something I didn’t want this book to have at all. If I got too much into that, that would be a critical focus, as it is with any memoir. I purposely decided I have no real reason to share those feelings.”

Moore went to live with Prinz in London in 2012. The couple were married in late 2020, and she took his last name. The Moores work together on the Ecstatic Peace Library publishing imprint and an associated record label, the Daydream Library Series. In “Sonic Life,” Thurston refers to Eva as “a wish come true.”

Earlier this year, Moore recorded a new album — “Flow Critical Lucidity,” due out in the spring — in London with his band, the Thurston Moore Group. (Eva wrote the lyrics.)

Despite having new music on the horizon, Moore said he wanted to step back from touring, in part so he can dedicate more time to writing fiction (he’s working on what he called a contemporary “ghost story” set on New York’s Lower East Side), and in part because of the physical toll of the road (he cited a pronounced case of tinnitus). “Maybe I’m going to just sort of relegate myself to performing in special situations,” he said, “as opposed to playing every doughnut shop across the land.”