Quotes by Jonny Greenwood

About Jonny Greenwood:

Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwood is an English musician and composer best known as a member of the rock band Radiohead. Beyond his primary roles as Radiohead's lead guitarist and keyboardist, Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist and also plays viola, harmonica, glockenspiel, ondes Martenot, banjo and drums, and works with computer-generated sounds and sampling; he is also a computer programmer and writes music software used by Radiohead. Noted for his aggressive playing style, Greenwood is consistently named as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I think It's a bit of a disappointment that a lot of people's Golden Age of music is still the '60s.

Jonny Greenwood

There's nothing like sitting in a completely quiet room, and then the strings start up. It's like when you go to the cinema - the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much d...

Jonny Greenwood

I think it should be ambitious and good music does deal with life and art and all these wonderful things.

Jonny Greenwood

It's kind of not about the quality of the art, as much as this is what I love doing and I'd have a worse time doing anything else. That's kind of as far as I think in terms of philosophy.

Jonny Greenwood

Nothing's more exciting than a day in a studio with a string section - or more ruinously expensive. So it's good to feed that habit away from the band, especially if it means more experience for the next Radiohead string day.

Jonny Greenwood

I don't mind when people are telling me about their 1971 Firebird, but it's the same thing as people telling me about their car or something. It's fine if you have an interest. By talking with me, though, you could be interviewing a novelist about gu...

Jonny Greenwood

If I'm on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they're finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music st...

Jonny Greenwood

Jamaican reggae is the style of music I always reach for when ranting to friends about how you could listen to one style of music exclusively for the rest of your life - and it would all be great and varied and worth hearing.

Jonny Greenwood

It feels like Radiohead are famous, but that no one knows who we are. Which is brilliant, really.

Jonny Greenwood

If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. T...

Jonny Greenwood

I fell in love with electronics, which for me was the terra incognita, because I had never heard such sounds. If you'd asked me 50 years ago, I would have said the future of music is only electronic, but I would have been wrong. I learnt how to produ...

Jonny Greenwood

It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the '60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it feels more modern t...

Jonny Greenwood

The rest of the band were basically friends, So it was me following them around and begging them to let me be in their band for two or three years. And they finally let me in on the harmonica, actually, and then the keyboards, and finally the guitar.

Jonny Greenwood

Right now my mind is on the people who stole our instruments, and, specifically, the person with my guitar, which will no doubt end its days having Green Day songs worked out on it. A better fate was deserved - and while the reverence given to guitar...

Jonny Greenwood

I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff.

Jonny Greenwood

I can remember soundtracks that you just can't separate from the film - It's just so intertwined, so important. Like the Hitchcock ones where they kind of inform each other and become this larger thing as a result.

Jonny Greenwood

But I was in the Radiohead studio today and Phil was there drumming and Thom was there playing. We feel like we've only just stopped and already people are wanting us to carry on.

Jonny Greenwood

I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I'm sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles.

Jonny Greenwood

People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis' record but never think of hearing any of them twice in a row - there's just too much to get through.

Jonny Greenwood

Obviously there will be a backlash. If you believe the hype you have to believe a backlash too. Any criticism we get, is always stuff we've already criticised ourselves.

Jonny Greenwood

Author Bio

  • NameJonny Greenwood
  • DescriptionBritish musician
  • BornNovember 5, 1971
  • CountryEngland
  • ProfessionGuitarist; Banjoist; Composer; Ondist