Christopher O'Riley
KID O'
Pianist Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead, by Special Arrangement
Christopher O'Riley loves Radiohead. He's the type of fan who's heard all the B-sides and bootleg concert recordings and can rattle off Radiohead trivia like a seasoned groupie. Of course, Radiohead have lots of fans, but O'Riley is a special case: He also happens to be a distinguished classical pianist. Some might find his fanaticism a bit odd, but judging by the easy way he relates to talented young people as host of Public Radio's From the Top, it's really no surprise that he would also connect with the genius of a band like Radiohead. Not content merely to sing along with their records and strum an air guitar, O'Riley has arranged a bunch of their songs for the piano, 15 of which fill True Love Waits. (The band signed off on the project but has been characteristically tight-lipped about it.) He told Barnes & Noble.com's Andrew Farach-Colton about the roots of his Radiohead mania and how he made their songs his own.
Barnes & Noble.com: Let's start with the obvious questions: How did you first discover Radiohead's music, and what's the attraction?
Christopher O'Riley: The first record I heard was OK Computer. I'm a little foggy about how I came to it, although I think it might have been the groundswell of positive press reaction, and that made me curious to hear it.
Radiohead's music has many attractions for me. They're one of the only bands I've heard that has really created a strong body of work. When a classical listener buys a recording of, say, Mahler's Fourth Symphony, they know there will be no weak tracks. And it's the same with Radiohead -- all the way through every record they've done and beyond. Then there's the wealth of textural beauty and colors, interesting shapes and harmonies, which are the same things that draw me to the music of Scriabin and Shostakovich.
At the base of it, though, it's simply great songwriting, and an unwillful but intuitive sense of pushing the boundaries at the behest of the needs of the song. I could do a technical analysis of "Everything in Its Right Place" and tell you that every bar of the song is in 10/4 except for one in 9/4. But it's not because they did some sort of Bartókian measure analysis and decided that the middle bar of the piece should be in 9; it's just what's demanded by the lyrics.
B&N.com: What made you decide to transcribe their songs for piano?
C.O'R.: It was basically just covetousness. I don't make a habit of transcribing, but over the years I've done a fair amount of it -- the Lakmé duet from the British Airways commercials, a couple of Bach organ pieces, and a Piazzolla tango. Then on my radio show, From the Top, I play short pieces, and when I started running out of Chopin Preludes and things to play, it occurred to me that it might be nice to work these Radiohead pieces in, especially because we want to show that playing classical music is not a sort of a ghettoized activity. Most of the kids on our show are enthusiastic about all kinds of activities and about different kinds of music. So this was a good opportunity to say that music that's presented with love and care should be taken seriously by its listeners and shouldn't be burdened by labels of "popular" or "classical."
B&N.com: Did you make all of the transcriptions by ear?
C.O'R.: Yes. And they're transcriptions in a sense, but in many cases they're less than literal, simply because one faces the issue of how to translate guitar playing or electronic sounds into piano playing. If you just chug away on the piano with the exact same chords that a guitar plays, it sounds chunky and horrible. But I found a couple of solutions, like ostinato [repeated] patterns that suggest the chords involved while keeping up a kinetic feeling of perpetual motion, and it sounds nice on the piano.
My ultimate frustration, though, is in trying to convey a sense of the lyrical line and of the narrative, which I can't do on the piano at all. If you just plunk out the melody in single notes, it sounds pretty bare and ridiculous. So I've done a lot of re-harmonization, and in many cases I've fleshed out the line to try and get a similar feeling of plangency.
B&N.com: Your arrangements of the songs sound totally idiomatic on the piano, though hard as hell to play.
C.O'R.: Thanks. And, yes, they're very hard. Because I'm playing music that I love, it would appear to be a busman's holiday sort of project, but I can tell you that half of the arrangements on the record rank with the hardest pieces I play, like Stravinsky's Petrouchka Suite and Balakirev's Islamey.
B&N.com: I was struck by how you changed the character of some of the songs. "Knives Out," for example, is more dreamy than the version on the album Amnesiac. Was faithfulness to the original recorded version a priority for you, or did you want to make the transcriptions more of a personal statement?
C.O'R.: It's funny you mention that song, because the story on "Knives Out" is that the band played it something like 250 times in the course of the recording sessions. I'm not sure exactly what was so hard about it, but in any case they've made it almost a dance number, whereas I'm drawn to its harmonies and the darkness of it. And I think the darkness of the lyrics lends to that. So, yes, that's a difference in direction.
B&N.com: I love the version of "Thinking About You" from Pablo Honey, where you change the rhythm guitar part into this intricate contrapuntal accompaniment.
C.O'R.: There is this whole body of guitar-based songs, and at first I didn't really feel comfortable addressing them. "Thinking About You" was the first one where I tried to come up with a different solution. And then, before I played the songs at the Miller Theater concert [in New York], I lent the publicist a home demo, and she said she thought it sounded like the Chopin G Major Prelude. And I thought, Oh my God, she's right! Not only that, but it's in the same key. It's not like I thought, I'm going to do this song à la Chopin, but clearly, I have this accumulated wealth of musical shapes and patterns from all the various pieces that I've played in my lifetime.
B&N.com: Do you think an album like True Love Waits will help to get pop fans into classical music, or get classical fans into Radiohead, or both?
C.O'R.: That's happening already. People write in to From the Top all the time asking, "Who is this Mr. Head, and where do I find more of his beautiful music?" And then, on the Radiohead message boards, people are writing to me and saying, "I notice you're playing a Mozart concerto. I'd really like to hear that." Now they have a "friend" in the business. They trust me, so they'll go listen to Mozart. That's an amazing thing.
May 2003 Andrew Farach-Colton
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