Jonny Greenwood tells NPR A Moon Shaped Pool went to eight-track tape

Radiohead put their usual Pro Tools aside and made A Moon Shaped Pool on an analogue eight-track tape machine, Jonny Greenwood told Bob Boilen in a 24-minute interview for NPR's All Songs Considered, posted on 4 August. The band change the way they record with every album, he says.

This is going to sound very conceited, but it's a surprise to me how well so many of these songs came out

Jonny Greenwood¹

Each record they finish still leaves them feeling they didn't quite mean to do it like that, and that the next one will be different. It's kind of like rewriting the same letter and getting each draft slightly wrong.¹

Greenwood sees the band's job as arranging. When Thom Yorke sits at the piano with a song like “Pyramid Song”, the question is how not to make it worse. His favourite days are string days, with the parts set out on empty stands in the morning and an orchestra booked for four hours later. “Burn the Witch” was a rare chance to put strings on an unfinished song, he says in a passage the music magazine DIY transcribed. It was just Yorke singing over a drum machine when he wrote the parts, and the rhythm is the players strumming their violins with guitar plectrums.

Instead of stealing cars and having a good time as a teenager I was literally playing the recorder like until the age of eighteen, seriously, with no shame.

Jonny Greenwood¹