Jonny Greenwood tells The Talks the guitar has lost its rebellion

Jonny Greenwood tells Emma Robertson of The Talks that the guitar is a traditional instrument now, on a par with the violin and the accordion, with no rebellion left in it. City brokers buy guitars to hang on their walls. The sooner it loses that image the better, he says. He hears instruments by the colour of their sound rather than what they bring with them, the way a pedal steel brings country. A guitar, to him, is wires strung over pickups on a piece of wood.

He moves techniques from one instrument to another: a cello bow on the guitar for “Burn the Witch”, a cello played like a banjo for The Power of the Dog, a plectrum on violas and violins. Limits help too. On Ranjha, his new album with Shye Ben Tzur and The Rajasthan Express, “Shemesh” is written in the todi scale, and Ben Tzur ruled out notes in Greenwood's guitar part. He believes in an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.¹

Players who rehearse four or five hours a day leave him in awe; beside them he calls himself a layabout who can play a few chords. He would rather be challenged by playing something else. It's nice to be struggling.¹ But he has no time for the idea that music is more sincere for coming from ignorance. The middle of “Paranoid Android” borrows the Bach chorale writing he learned at school; the end is guitar solos, and I don't know what those notes are.¹

Film scores begin with restrictions. For Norwegian Wood he went looking for 1960s guitars and a reel-to-reel recorder, the kit the book's characters would have had. He says Paul Thomas Anderson plays the music loud in his films and lets it run on, which is rare. Greenwood likes the tension of the deadline.