Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood Discusses 'In Rainbows'

Guitarist, keyboardist, and all-around instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood of the band Radiohead discussed the band's new In Rainbows album as well as his own Popcorn Superhet Receiver project with Rolling Stone magazine for a feature in the next issue of that magazine.

Here are the highlights, for those curious about today's album release:

Why did you choose to release the album this way?

Partly just to get it out quickly, so everyone would hear it at thesame time, and partly because it was an experiment that felt worthtrying, really.

Why the variable pricing?

It’s fun to make people stop for a few seconds and think about whatmusic is worth, and that’s just an interesting question to ask people.**

How would you respond to complaints about the sound quality – that 160 isn’t a high enough bitrate?

I don’t know, we talked about it and we just wanted to make it a bitbetter than iTunes, which it is, so that’s kind of good enough, really.
It’s never going to be CD quality, because that’s what CD does.

What goals did you have for the album itself?*

I suppose we wanted to get back slightly to Kid A in that we were spending longer experimenting and trying stuff out — it wasn’t so much of a performance-based thing, like Hail to the Thief.
Other than that, it’s the usual thing of turning up with these songsand the pressure is, "Don’t fuck it up, don’t record them badly, don’tdo bad arrangements of them, and do them justice." So that’s what we’vedone.

In a similar interview with Gothamist (also primarily about Popcorn Superhet Receiver), Greenwood said the band will know tomorrow how many people have purchased the album, and what they've chosen to pay for it:

*Have you gotten any figures of how much people are choosing to pay? *

____Nowe get the numbers tomorrow supposedly. Yeah, I don’t know. The moreexciting thing for me is just hearing it on the radio today and knowingit’s landed on everybody’s desk at the same time. That’s what’sexciting. But yeah, I’m sure our manager will have some idea soon.

**

(via pitchfork; image from fiddle while you burn)