Jonny Greenwood tells Fresh Air he spent months in Radiohead unheard

Jonny Greenwood spent his first months in Radiohead with his keyboard switched off, he tells Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. Thom Yorke's band already had a keyboard player they didn't get on with, because he played so loud, so the newcomer made sure nobody could hear him.

I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn't know that I'd already turned it off.

Jonny Greenwood¹

Yorke even praised what he couldn't hear, Greenwood remembers. I can't quite hear what you're doing, but I think you're adding a really interesting texture, because I can tell when you're not playing.¹ Greenwood went home in the evenings to work out his chords, and over the months that followed turned the keyboard up a little at a time.

Most of the 35-minute interview, posted a day before the Oscar nominations, is about film. Greenwood has three new scores: Licorice Pizza, his fourth for Paul Thomas Anderson, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, which already has a Golden Globe nomination, and Pablo Larraín's Spencer. He started on the Campion film when he saw test footage of New Zealand standing in for Montana.

He avoids click tracks, so a director sometimes has to move the picture to fit the music, and he would rather write twice as much as a film needs than fuss over fitting cues around the dialogue. Software has never given him the variety and strangeness of real instruments, and it's easily my favorite day of the year when the string players turn up for an afternoon.¹

The muffled piano on Phantom Thread comes from a roll of felt laid between the hammers and the strings. It is a little out of tune as well, just because I'm a bit lazy with my booking the piano tuner, I'm afraid.¹