Thom Yorke on NPR

Thom Yorke plays DJ for Bob Boilen on NPR's All Songs Considered, down the line from the BBC in Oxford. Most new music reaches him from the rest of the band, or as downloads from Boomkat and Bleep, because the shops he has loved near him go under fast. He starts with Liars' Drum's Not Dead, played endlessly in his car, “whereas the rest of my family will be looking at me very puzzled while I play it”. Modeselektor's “Kill Bill Vol. 4” he loves for being fantastically dumb, with people talking in the toilets before it starts.

The Eraser was almost all made inside a laptop. He only threw himself into sequencers in 2000, and a new piece of gear is a writing period of its own, an idea he has heard credited to Aphex Twin; it feels like collaborating with the engineers who designed it. Cutting and pasting can be an absolute curse, and what Nigel Godrich brings is speed. The band have just got Lemur touch-screen controllers, which at last give the others a physical way into what the computer does.

Madvillain is the most inspiring wordsmith he knows at the moment. On “Nude”, the line about painting yourself white was the first thing he wrote, and he spent a very long time trying to change it, because “you look at it on paper and it's like what the hell's that”. Jonny Greenwood had to point out the extra beat in “Everything in Its Right Place”, and on “Videotape” Yorke moved the first beat of the bar two beats early without noticing. The lyrics are printed only because his pronunciation is poor.

Hearing a finished record is the worst part, because all the way to the mastering “you've never heard the holes, you've never heard the weaknesses, and then when it's done that's all you can hear”. The In Rainbows MP3s were squeezed down a little so they wouldn't take ages to download, and not least so they wouldn't blow the band's server apart. Diplo is remixing “Nude”, and the main thing, Yorke has told him by email, is to keep it in 6/8.