Christopher O'Riley to record a second album of Radiohead songs

Christopher O'Riley will record a second album of Radiohead songs this winter, to come out in the spring, he tells the Knoxville News Sentinel. In its first week his first, True Love Waits, sold more copies than his ten earlier albums, mostly classical works and his own compositions, had sold between them.

The idea came from From the Top, the nationally syndicated US radio show for gifted classical musicians not yet at college, which he hosts. He began playing Radiohead in his weekly solo spot, and the curiosity it stirred made a whole CD of them seem worth trying. Its 15 tracks are his own solo piano transcriptions, drawn from across the band's ten years of records, and he approaches them as he does the classical repertoire. I tend to think of great music as great music, regardless of the genre.¹

On 30 September he brought the arrangements to the Thomas Recital Hall at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, one stop on an autumn of US recitals, with Rameau and Brahms in the first half and Radiohead in the second.

The paper's reviewer, only a casual Radiohead listener himself, thought O'Riley played harder after the interval and that most of the arrangements were as appealing as the band's originals. He singled out “Airbag”, “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and “Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was”, where layers of piano stand in for the band's synthesisers, bass and drums.