Bob Boilen: You're connected to the All Songs Considered+ podcast. I'm Bob Boilen, and on this edition, a conversation with Jonny Greenwood, the man of many textures as guitarist, electronics manipulator, and arranger with Radiohead.
The group's on tour playing a wide swath of songs from their remarkably varied career, including the new record, A Moon Shaped Pool. Jonny Greenwood was at WBEZ in Chicago. The new record is their ninth studio album. It's more string-based, and maybe more subtle than anything the band's done before.
I was curious how Radiohead approaches making records. Do they just go into a studio and play, or do they sit down and talk about the sound they want to create? So we start the conversation that way.
Jonny Greenwood: We tend to approach every new record with a new technique or a new style of recording, if we can manage it. That was true this time as well.
Bob Boilen: What would the conversation be like? How would you describe it? Because that's hard to do in words.
Jonny Greenwood: I guess it feels like every record we make, we finish and have a collective thought that we didn't quite mean to do it like that, and the next one will be different. Then we'll get it right.
It's kind of like rewriting the same letter and getting each draft slightly wrong. It's either a good motivational force or a terribly depressing, negative way to look at it, depending on how you see it. But yeah, it keeps us going.
Bob Boilen: If I can get a little more literal, because I like doing that... Do you sit in a room with instruments and talk about sounds you want to make? Do you talk about attitudes or approaches? How does it actually begin?
Jonny Greenwood: Well, what we did is kind of instructive. On the last record, The King of Limbs, we ditched instruments. We wrote our own software and used computers in that way.
So this record was almost a reaction to that. We went to the other extreme. We started using magnetic tape again, setting ourselves limits, and working within the eight or sixteen tracks we allowed ourselves for each song.
It was far more restrictive than last time, and we found that quite a creative way to work.
Bob Boilen: I think restrictions, for artists, are one of the most amazing ways to get something to happen that you wouldn't have expected.
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly. When you don't have an undo button on a recording machine, it adds this creative tension to what you're doing.
You play a version of a guitar part and think you can do it better, so you try again. If it isn't any better, you've lost the old one. You can't simply go back one step.
There's that fun pressure to recording. Traditionally, you use Pro Tools, where there are layers and layers of things you can always go back to, revise, and mend.
Bob Boilen: I love that we're living in an age where you can say, "Traditionally, we use Pro Tools."
Jonny Greenwood: I know.
So this time we were trying something different. At the same time, we wanted to make sure we still used computers and laptops. We didn't want to make it one big retro experience or only use instruments that were around in the 1960s.
The idea was to have computers and laptops, but to end things on tape whenever we could.
Bob Boilen: I'd like to play a song—maybe the first one—and perhaps you can tell me how it came together.
Actually, I was wondering, because so many people think of you primarily as a guitarist. Obviously you're also an orchestrator and play many instruments. If I play the opening track, where are you in the song?
I'll bring the music up underneath us. If you don't mind, just talk a little about how the song came together and what your role was.
Jonny Greenwood: This song was one of the rare chances we had to get our hands on an unfinished song so we could put strings on it right from the beginning.
Usually strings are an afterthought. They're almost like decoration added at the end of a song. I've been saying for years, "Wouldn't it be great to start with strings?"
This song was just Thom singing with a drum machine and nothing else. I wrote the string arrangement to that.
So what you're hearing is an orchestra strumming their violins with guitar picks. That's the rhythmic sound you're hearing. It's all strings.
Bob Boilen: Who are these people?
Jonny Greenwood: It's an orchestra called the London Contemporary Orchestra. They're a young, eager orchestra I've been working with a lot in London recently.
They perform lots of new works by living composers and try to present classical music that's less traditional and more contemporary.
Bob Boilen: Is that the simplest way to put it?
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly. They tend to play both extremes—either living composers or very early Baroque music. Missing out everything in between feels like quite a healthy, modern thing to do.
Bob Boilen: When you presented the string parts to the orchestra, were they listening to Thom and the drum machine while they played?
Jonny Greenwood: Yes. They were playing along to that, and the conductor was following it and leading them through.
String sessions are the most exciting recording days for me. I live for them. There's something wonderful about arriving in the morning, putting music onto empty music stands, knowing an orchestra is arriving later that day, and that you'll only have four hours with them.
You have to make the most of it. Then, to sit in the room and hear them play... there's really nothing else like it.
Bob Boilen: Are you one of those people who can hear the music in your head? Can you write a part out and know what it's going to sound like?
Jonny Greenwood: Yes, I can. I'm not especially good at hearing chords and harmonies, but melodies I can usually hear and notate.
Even so, it's still incredibly exciting when the orchestra finally plays it.
Bob Boilen: How many string players are playing these parts with guitar picks?
Jonny Greenwood: This was actually a relatively small group—only thirteen players. But it's amazing what they can do with their instruments and how they've dedicated their lives to learning them.
Every time I see someone in their twenties carrying a cello or violin case, I'm still a bit in awe. They look much cooler than people like me carrying guitars.
Bob Boilen: When you were little, you played violin.
Jonny Greenwood: Viola, really.
Bob Boilen: Really?
Jonny Greenwood: Yes. I played in youth viola orchestras when I was a teenager, and I was also in recorder groups. I was a very nerdy musical kid.
Bob Boilen: Did you enjoy it, or did you want to abandon it? I mean, if I mention Jonny Greenwood to most people, they're not going to say, "Oh yes, that great violist."
Jonny Greenwood: That's my manager laughing in the background, which is really encouraging. Pointing and laughing makes it even worse.
I mean, I'm blushing now, as you can probably tell. I know I should be ashamed. I know I should have been...
Bob Boilen: ...a contender.
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly. Instead of stealing cars and having a good time when I was a teenager, I was literally playing little wooden recorders until I was about eighteen. Seriously. And with absolutely no shame.
Bob Boilen: Were you playing Renaissance music?
Jonny Greenwood: Yes. It really could have gone a completely different way.
Bob Boilen: Was it the drugs?
Jonny Greenwood: (laughs) Oh, that's a terrible confession. I almost wish I had a drug habit—something a little more exciting—but no.
There are actually bits of recorder playing on some Radiohead records. If you listen closely to the choruses in "The Bends," there are recorders in there. At the beginning of one of the songs on the new record there's recorder as well.
So it's slowly finding its way into Radiohead records.
Bob Boilen: So the next Radiohead record is going to be Thom, you, and a recorder. Breaking news.
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly.
Bob Boilen: When I think of the recorder, and then I think of you and the incredible amount of texture that you bring into Radiohead's music, they almost seem like polar opposites.
How did you make that leap? Were you always attracted to denser, more intense sounds?
Jonny Greenwood: I think we see ourselves as arrangers of the songs.
Thom will write a song—or half a song—and then we'll develop it together. The real challenge is asking, "How do you put this song across without ruining it? How do you arrange it?"
There's no individual interest in what instrument any of us plays. It's entirely about serving the song.
It's a bit like in The Buddy Holly Story, where they go into the studio and the producer says, "Right, I do the arranging, and I'm going to tell you what to play."
We're a little bit like that. It isn't about saying, "Can I play my guitar part now?" It's about asking, "What will serve this song best?"
The problem is that Thom will often sit at the piano and play something like "Pyramid Song," and it's already beautiful.
Then we have to record it without making it worse. How do you improve on someone simply sitting at a piano singing a song that's already extraordinary?
So yes, we're really arrangers.
Bob Boilen: Let me play another piece. This is "Daydreaming." It begins with what sounds like keyboards...
Jonny Greenwood: That's actually magnetic tape and laptops working together.
It's magnetic tape being manipulated—touching the metal reel, slowing it down, speeding it up—and combining that with digital sounds.
Again, it's a bit like what I was saying about the orchestra. We were trying to use very old technology and very new technology together, while almost skipping everything in between.
So you have a piano, analogue tape, and then all the digital processing layered on top.
Bob Boilen: I've been making electronic music since the late 1970s, and one of the things I love—and one of the reasons I'm attracted to your work—is that combination of organic and electronic sounds.
They complement one another in the same way that music and pictures complement one another. There's something incredibly powerful about those two elements existing together.
Jonny Greenwood: Thank you, Bob.
Bob Boilen: I love this song. Thom is singing so beautifully here. His voice is amazing.
When something like this is recorded, are all of you in the room together? Or does he finally get rid of everyone and record the vocal by himself? How does that work?
Jonny Greenwood: This song is actually a strange example.
We recorded the backing track first, because we couldn't quite find our way into the song while we were all working together.
So, as I remember it, we built the basic track without Thom present.
Bob Boilen: What exactly did you have at that point? Just the tapes and the basic sounds?
Jonny Greenwood: Thom had already written the song, but I ended up playing the piano part.
We built this backing track and then presented it to him so that he could sing over it.
I think it was actually quite a nice change for him. He's usually the one who has to begin everything, whereas this time we handed him something that already existed and invited him into it.
It's another good example of why working on tape can be exciting. You hear something that's slightly imperfect or slightly out of time, but if you try to fix it you might never capture quite the same feeling again.
That whole process became part of the record.
Bob Boilen: Is there another song that illustrates a different way of working?
Jonny Greenwood: "Glass Eyes" is a good example. That's basically just Thom and strings.
Bob Boilen: Before we get to that, what computer programming environment are you using to create these sounds?
Jonny Greenwood: That's a piano that's being processed with software I wrote myself using Max/MSP.
It's essentially a programming language for music and sound.
Bob Boilen: For people who don't know what that means, it's a bit like having a pile of LEGO bricks on the floor. You connect them together and build exactly the tool you want.
Jonny Greenwood: That's exactly it.
Instead of accepting somebody else's idea of what an echo or a reverb should sound like, you build your own from the ground up.
It's a nice feeling to have that level of control.
Bob Boilen: Do happy accidents happen while you're doing that? Do you discover ideas you never intended, or are you very focused on reaching a particular goal?
Jonny Greenwood: There are definitely happy accidents.
But there are also plenty of occasions when everything simply breaks, and the whole band is standing around waiting for my software to start working again.
It's a bit like owning an old car that breaks down every few hundred miles. You have to lift the bonnet and try to get it running again.
Depending on your mood, that's either charming or incredibly frustrating.
Bob Boilen: Let's hear a little of "Glass Eyes."
You have a remarkable way of creating musical spaces that feel like rooms I'd want to live in. Lots of people use reverb, echo, and similar effects, but sometimes they become distracting rather than inviting.
Jonny Greenwood: I know exactly what you mean. It's a dangerous thing to rely on. But if it's genuinely making the music more beautiful, then it becomes a creative tool rather than simply an effect.
Bob Boilen: I remember seeing Radiohead almost eight years ago now. I remember because Barack Obama had just accepted his party's nomination for President that evening. It was a historic night in America.
You were playing an outdoor concert in Santa Barbara, California. After the show I was wandering around by myself. Thom and I had planned to meet afterwards—we hadn't met before, although we'd talked—but I found myself standing near a family.
I started talking with them because I was missing my son, and it turned out that the father was the inventor of the Line 6 effects units.
For anyone who doesn't know them, if you've ever watched a rock band on stage you've probably seen one of those green metal boxes with footswitches that musicians use for delays, looping and other effects. They've become almost ubiquitous.
He told me, "I know Jonny uses my equipment, but he's doing things with it that I never imagined anybody would do."
Do you really dig that deeply into guitar effects and try to make them your own?
Jonny Greenwood: I try to remember that even the simplest effects are often overlooked.
A delay pedal, for example, is an incredibly powerful idea. You can do so many creative things with just that one effect that it's easy to get distracted by collecting more and more pedals.
It comes back to limitations again. I think you become much more creative when you deliberately restrict yourself.
Bob Boilen: So you really do dig deep.
Jonny Greenwood: I hope so.
I'm still finding new ways to use those pedals. In fact, I only own one delay pedal, and that's all I really use.
Bob Boilen: Guitar players listening to this are probably thinking, "That's all you need."
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly.
To be honest, I'm becoming more interested in getting another recorder than another guitar.
Bob Boilen: Process the recorder instead.
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly.
Bob Boilen: That makes me think about how you've evolved as a guitar player.
I could probably play almost any five or six Radiohead songs and ask someone to point out where the guitar is. They'd probably struggle—even when there is a guitar present.
Jonny Greenwood: That's success, isn't it? That makes me very happy.
I remember being a kid and loving records because of the songs themselves. I never really paid much attention to the musicians who played on them.
When Radiohead's first record came out, journalists would ask me who my favourite guitar players were, and I'd have to answer with the names of bands rather than individual musicians because I genuinely didn't know.
I had to keep reminding myself: "John McGeoch played in Magazine."
What amazed me wasn't somebody's guitar technique—it was the fact that a song had somehow come into existence. The idea that someone had simply sat down and written it felt miraculous.
That was always the thing that fascinated me much more than instrumental virtuosity.
Bob Boilen: So, in a sense, everything becomes part of one orchestra to you. The personality is in the finished piece rather than in any individual player.
It's a bit like listening to an orchestra—you don't usually know the names of the individual violinists.
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly. I rather like thinking anonymously in that way.
Bob Boilen: Earlier you said that you usually set out to make one kind of record and end up making another.
Can you put into words what you were aiming for this time, what you feel you didn't quite achieve, and what you ended up discovering instead?
Jonny Greenwood: There are a few specific things I'd still change, but overall—and this is going to sound terribly conceited—I'm actually surprised by how well so many of these songs turned out.
The handful of frustrations I still have are completely outweighed by the eight or nine recordings that I'm simply amazed we managed to capture.
We were incredibly lucky, and we're genuinely happy to have this record.
Bob Boilen: If you think about the amount of work that went into making what became roughly an hour-long album, do you have any idea how many hours you actually spent getting there?
Jonny Greenwood: My manager is sitting over there, so I'm looking at him to see whether he'll agree with this...
But we recorded about eighty percent of the album in roughly two weeks.
We went into the studio with those limitations already in place, and because we couldn't endlessly revise things, we simply had to perform them.
These days it sometimes feels as though bands spend one day recording and then the producer spends the rest of the week editing, assembling and constructing the performance afterwards.
We've gradually found ourselves preferring the opposite approach.
You should spend your time actually playing the music and trying to get it right in the room. The result is often stranger, but I think it's also more interesting.
Of course, we'll probably become frustrated with that approach before the next record and head off in an entirely different direction again.
That's always the process: convincing yourself that this wasn't quite right and that next time you'll try something completely different.
Bob Boilen: Before we finish, I have to ask—what are you listening to these days?
Jonny Greenwood: I'm trying to get into heavy metal at the moment because I feel like I completely missed out on it. I keep asking people for recommendations.
I saw Deep Purple a couple of weeks ago in Italy, and they were fantastic. It's all completely new music to me. I really don't know much of that world, but I'm finding it fascinating.
There's something about that hard rock sound, especially when it's driven by a really swinging drummer. Ian Paice is just an incredible drummer.
Bob Boilen: You're asking the wrong person—I should probably be asking you. But if you're looking for music that's deeply textured, I'd recommend Swans. Boris, the Japanese band, is another one worth exploring.
Jonny Greenwood: Yes, yes. Thom is obsessed with Boris. He keeps playing their records to me.
Bob Boilen: They're unbelievably loud.
Jonny Greenwood: Exactly.
Bob Boilen: It's bone-rattling music.
Jonny Greenwood: It really is.
Bob Boilen: So, just to confirm, the next Radiohead album is going to be a heavy metal record featuring recorder?
Jonny Greenwood: (laughs) That's right.
Bob Boilen: Fantastic. We've got our headline.
Jonny Greenwood: Perfect.
Bob Boilen: Jonny Greenwood, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.
Jonny Greenwood: Thank you. It was nice talking to you.
Bob Boilen: Likewise.
Jonny Greenwood: Cheers.
Bob Boilen: Cheers.