Jonny Greenwood won't fly to New York for his American premiere

On the morning In Rainbows went on sale, Jonny Greenwood told Gothamist that the main thing was getting the album out quickly. It is partly an experiment the band are doing for themselves, having grown bored of how they did things before, and the talk of it as a swipe at the industry is not what drove them. It's just interesting to make people pause for even a few seconds and think about what music is worth now.¹

He has no figures yet on what people are paying. They are due tomorrow, and hearing the album on the radio, knowing it reached everyone at once, matters more to him.

Making the record was more like Kid A and Amnesiac than Hail to the Thief, he says, with long experiments in the studio. None of the songs was easy, though “Reckoner” came together quickly.

Greenwood is cutting down on flying because of carbon emissions, and that includes New York in January. “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”, his piece for string orchestra, has two nights in the Wordless Music Series there, on a programme with music by John Adams and Gavin Bryars. I'd love to but I can't really justify the flight just to come to that.¹

The piece is about radios and hearing music that isn't there, like a familiar song heard over a car engine. A superhet is a kind of radio receiver, a name he had written on a notebook page of radio words. He revised it for its last performance, cutting the more obtuse passages. It now runs about 12 minutes, one section flowing into the next. He won the Listeners' Award for it at last year's British Composer Awards. He hasn't started the new piece the award commissioned, and thinking about it makes him sweat.

Now the album is out, the band are talking about touring somewhere in the world in 2008, and they have had a report done on how much pollution a tour creates. It weighs big venues against small ones, city sites against out-of-town ones, festivals, and whether it is better for the fans to travel or the band. Carbon offsets don't satisfy him. We've heard bad things about that. I'm not sure that that's enough; to buy off our guilt with money.¹ It'd be crazy to not tour for that reason but it'd also be crazy to tour in too greedy a way.¹