Photo: Wendy Lynch

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Why Radiohead? What is it about their music that drew you toward it?

Initially for the same reasons that I’m drawn to any pieces. I’m very interested in texture and harmony — the more sensual the harmonic language, the happier I am. There’s a lot of pop music that’s rather vertically oriented, like a wall of sound, and it’s more about the treatment of the sound than it is about different harmonic twists, or different lines — the guitar line, the bass line, the drum line. But the more weave and counterpoint in the music, the better chance I have of saying, Oh yeah, well, if I follow that, then that suggests the harmony or melody in a way that makes it compelling.

Robert Schumann is a great example of a composer who wrote hundreds of small character pieces for piano, and was a great melodist. At the same time, what interests me about his music is the underpinning; the accompaniment in every song is really unique to that piece. And that’s what makes that hierarchy between melody, harmony and movement an interesting thing to weave together.

I try and figure out, well, what’s the most important thing? If I’m recording a Radiohead piece, and I get more concerned about the beat, the rhythm, and I lose sight of the melody, it’s not a successful performance. If I take care of the melody, usually the rhythm takes care of itself. If you go too far, the melody can become everything, and I can get into a sort of classical mode where it’s not a constant beat I’m actually stretching. Or it can be sort of structured — that’s what makes things interesting, and that’s what makes things spontaneous, even with music that’s very strictly written down.

What drew me to Radiohead’s music instantly was harmony and texture. Even though I think only one or two of the guys in the band reads music, every song that they have is attributed to each member of the band. When I read Radiohead’s book, it was surprising to see who was responsible for writing certain things. I mean, it wasn’t like Lennon and McCartney — there were some songs that Phil Selway got major composition credit for, so you don’t know what the conversation in the studio was while they were working on it or jamming or whatever. But obviously there’s a lot of individual contribution; that individuation is what makes every song unique, and what gives me a foot in the door and finding a way to make it work on piano.

When I started thinking about arrangements, initially I was making piano pieces out of classical string orchestra pieces or organ pieces, or tangos. When I was doing a radio show, initially the idea behind the program was to have all kinds of pre-college musicians on the program. At some stations it had to be all classical or whatever, and it was really sort of a shame, so the great pop pieces were pieces that I could play on my own, and stations would break away and take care of local business, or they’d play the pieces. So it was a nice opportunity to be able to play a non-classical piece and have our announcer come on and say, “That’s our host playing such and such by Radiohead,” and then have people write into the show and say, “Who is this Mr. Head and where can I find more of his music?”

We had people reacting to it without genre prejudice; it was just something they heard me playing on a classical radio program that they loved. That made a more compelling and encouraging environment for me to continue doing just what I liked to do. So at the same I was doing Radiohead I was doing the Smiths, Nick Drake and all of these bands that I have on the new record.

I never really set out to do a Radiohead record, it was just that there were a dozen songs that I had done and made for a good record. And when the first one was done, there were still lots more to do. The stuff on the new record has been around in my repertoire for as long as I’ve been doing the Radiohead stuff. It’s always been a matter of the song rather than “Well, I’ll do the Cure or the Smiths” or whatever. It’s always been about whatever song I couldn’t get away from.

Your version of the Elliott Smith song “New Disaster” on the album is incredibly dense, and goes deeper and deeper into some rather difficult harmonic detail. What was your thinking about how to approach this song?

A lot of my thinking about Elliott Smith’s music has to do with the choices he made in the studio vs. choices he would make as a live performer — one guy with a guitar vs. one guy with a whole panoply of instruments in the studio. With “New Disaster,” the way in for me was the drone in thirds that he starts out in, basically an ostinato with just a third at the base of it. And it’s like, D and F are a minor third apart; if you put D and F on top of a B flat, the D and F become the top half of a major triad. If you have D as the base of the triad — D, F, A — they become the bottom half of a minor triad. If you could just take the third in and of itself, and make it a constant flux of interaction between that third and maybe another set of thirds, then you have something really interesting — then you’ve got what I feel is most compelling about Elliott’s music. And also, his lyrical output has to do with a real yin and yang, I mean it’s not just “Oh, I’m so depressed” blah blah blah; there’s a whole universe and a whole range of emotional truth in every song.

As a performer and as a person, Elliott was such a perfectionist that you always feel that he’s drawing you into this world rather than projecting it out across the footlights — something I’ve always found sort of annoying about people like Rufus Wainwright or Sufjan Stevens. There’s something about Elliott’s music that has more integrity dramatically, rather than as a personal statement.

And actually that can be said about Radiohead, that there’s a sort of microcosm in every song; it’s not just me, me, me — there’s this world. It’s a world made out of different impressions and different feelings, but it’s a universe, self-imposed. So having that kind of dichotomy — in strictly musical terms, of that third having a sense of ambiguity rather than harmonic stability — opened up all kinds of possibilities. It was a matter of approaching the song almost as a set of variations and seeing where that harmonic improvisation would take me. It was a lot of work coming up with that arrangement, but I’m very happy with the way it came out.

In the same light, there’s the Elliott Smith song “True Love.” It was one of his later songs; there are a few bootleg live versions of it, and there was a studio version that Jon Brion helped produce — it was hoped that it would be on From a Basement on a Hill but it didn’t make it. Lyrically it’s one of the most depressing songs that there is. But musically it’s one of his most beautiful songs. And in the way that “True Disaster” was a real journey, “True Love” was another one of that sort that had so much rich possibility, musically.

I must have recordings of, like,120 Elliott Smith shows. That’s the other thing: Radiohead is a fine-tuned machine. I have 100 of their shows on my iPod, too, but there’s no particular reason, because it’s not like they’re a jam band, it’s not like their performances vary that much from show to show. But Elliott — every show. Why do I need 120 performances of “True Disaster?” They’re all different, they’re all beautiful, they’re all true.

By the time of his last album especially, Elliott was inventing some fairly unheard-of new harmonies.

Well, “Speed Trials” is pretty spare harmonically, and it’s not sure sometimes whether he’s going for A minor or C major, again because of turning on the cusp of a major or minor third, as a root or at the top half of a triad. Even “Needle in the Hay” has a certain amount of spareness where the major and minor thing are suggested but not denoted, or not didactically, not dictated. I mean, it’s not a consistent thing in every song, but it’s something that he was able to do, and it wasn’t really a mechanism, it wasn’t really a trick. I think it was something for his music that needed to happen.

There are other songs like that. “How To Take a Fall,” which sounds more to me like a Rolling Stones song, he could do that. He could do Hank Williams, he could write a song based on whatever style the song demanded.

What is implied musically in these pop songs you interpret that suggests avenues for exploration? Invariably they become something quite different than what they originated as.

I elaborate. I embellish. Doing the song on piano, it’s important to incorporate classical variation, which has to do with the fact that I don’t have the lyrics; I don’t have the opportunity of having a real concrete sense of the lyrics projected through the song. But if I take the musical thread of melody and harmony, I can make a slightly more darkly tinged variation of that verse, or just use it as a basis for exploration.

For instance, on the Portishead song “The Rip,” it was initially a matter of subtracting or deconstructing. As opposed to a lot of their songs that I think are very atmospheric, this one almost had a modern classical feel to it, that ostinato going on all the time. So if I take that as a given, as a perfect template, then I can strip away to the bare bones of the song. I like opening up — the range of the piano is enormous, and on that one it starts out very slowly, and then gathers impetus and gathers interest as it varies on the ostinato. So then it becomes almost like a Chopin etude. It’s a real virtuoso piece. It starts out as a slight variation and distillation of the song, and ends up as a big piano vehicle.

Do you think much about who your audience is? Or is that a dangerous thing to do?

I’m mostly doing it for myself. I mean, just because I like playing what I like to play, I like to feel that, if I believe in something strongly, it’ll be compelling for an audience. I’ve always loved the idea of playing, even within the classical pantheon, music that I feel very strongly about that people may not have heard before.

I really love the idea of having this sense of discovery. I like playing the warhorses, I like playing pieces that people have played all the time, but it’s more exciting for me to be able to able to introduce people to new music. As a result, I’ll have kids writing into my website saying, “I love your Radiohead stuff. I see you’re playing a Mozart concerto in San Diego, I’ve always wanted to check him out.” That’s awesome. It’s like all of a sudden they have somebody in the business that they trust, so they’re going to try something new.

Classical music fans most often respond to Radiohead’s music in the same way that I do; they’re interested in the weave and the texture of the song and of the harmony, the compelling and unique harmonic language. And so there are a lot of classical listeners who are getting into pop music on the basis of my playing Radiohead or Elliott Smith.

There are so many kids who have no idea about any of this music. The whole alternative world is such a mystery to them because they’re completely done into ignorance by mass-produced pop music. Going into a junior high school and having nobody in the place even know who Radiohead is, it sort of takes me aback and makes me feel, well, you know, I guess it can’t be said that I’m flogging a commercially mercenary horse here, because it’s not like I’m playing Britney Spears.

It must be very satisfying to see how people are picking up on it.

You know, basically I enjoy playing this stuff. Yesterday I was working on a Chopin piece and I got really excited because after I finished that I was going to be working on the Tori Amos piece, just getting that back up to speed. With great music, there’s always something to be learned from it. I think I learned more about playing Radiohead on the piano from working on the Tori Amos song than I did on anything else, because she’s a piano player.

The problem with classical musicians is, we tend to skate a little bit much. In 2006 I performed some two-piano stuff with Astor Piazzolla’s pianist, Pablo Ziegler. Now, I’ve loved that music for a long time, but I think the American sensibility is more head-oriented, or interested in the quirks and the twists and turns, and Pablo was saying, “It’s a dance. It starts from the ground up.” And so there has to be a sense of solidity, and rootedness, that needs to set a standard, a foundation — at the same time, not so that it sounds leaden.

And so, for instance, Tori, every eighth note that she plays has a density and a weight to it, but it doesn’t keep the song from being aloft, flying, airborne. It just sounds invested, but not heavy in a bad way.

You put a lot of emphasis on the left hand in your playing. For the rock pieces you’re interpreting, is a specific concern with a strong rhythm section sound required?

Oh yeah.

How do you record your piano to give it a sound that can compete with rock dynamics?

The producer, Paul Geluso, had done a lot of recording of rock records, and the other records that he has done have been mostly of solo improvisatory music. For Out of My Hands, he set up sort of a globe of microphones that acted as a surround-sound array; and then there was a whole set of microphones on booms in the piano, there might have been five or six. He was able to then mix and master each song according to its needs. So there are some that incorporate a little bit more of the surround sound mix, incorporate more of the room; some of it is just very close in.

He’s routing to separate tracks, you mean?

Yes, and there’s no added ambience whatsoever, although there were also some room mikes, so there’s a little more ambient sound from those distant mikes in things like “New Disaster.” But it’s mostly straight-on close-miked for things like “Heart Shaped Box.” So every song was a different sound. And because Paul is used to doing mostly pop records, it’s not mixed down, as a lot of classical records are — the most annoying thing about having classical music on your iPod is you have to turn it way up; the basic classical mix is way soft.

You’re planning a touring program in which you will pair and juxtapose the work of classical composers and pop artists. How did you match them up?

I did three concerts last season at the Miller Theater at Columbia University — it was a video collaboration, too, with Jonathan Rosen and Steve Byram, who did my video mix on two screens. I’d been doing a program of my Radiohead things juxtaposed with preludes and fugues of Shostakovich. And I think they made a good contrast, because the fugues, I mean, these are the most densely contrapuntal interweaving textures there are. And so having the concentrated relief from that dense counterpoint to the relative ease and simplicity of a song was a nice way of progressing for a program.

I felt that Shostakovich and Radiohead were two composers who were really driven by irony. Musical irony is not something that happens too readily or easily or too often. Shostakovich was basically dealing with music as subtext because he was writing under a Stalinist regime, and so he was criticized and in fear of being disappeared — he saw a lot of his friends die that way. So that whole idea of the musical expression being a sub rosa idea was particular and individual to him.

Radiohead, on the other hand, can have a song like “No Surprises,” which on the surface is very pretty — I mean, you don’t get more pretty than glockenspiel — but it’s, you know, suicidal. And so I thought that kind of musical irony made them very good bedfellows.

I did another concert with songs of Elliott Smith set against piano pieces of Robert Schumann. Schumann was the most famous manic-depressive composer of all time. It was probably the first documented addiction to champagne, also. [Laughs] But there again is the idea of having an emotional world, a dramatic world, in microcosm, in a piece of music — the juxtapositions within one short piece of Robert Schumann reminded me very much of Elliott Smith, and again the textural considerations made it very good.

Nick Drake and Claude Debussy was the other pairing that I did. Nick Drake was very much enamoured of French music. Most of his happy time was in France, really. So I thought again about his guitar playing, and in doing his music I’m able to find the patternings, the fingerings, of his thing without having to deal with the tunings, because I could just transcribe the notes and they’d become his own idiosyncratic ostinatos — you know, the rolling figurations fit very beautifully to piano yet have their own particular character and are revolutionary in the same way that Claude Debussy was in the way that he wrote for piano.

So it was a nice way of juxtaposing them but also bringing out similar truths in all of them in each particular concert. In the end I think I’m happier now that I’m doing all of my programs unformatted, just whatever repertoire I’m doing at the point and in the same way incorporating classical pieces as they become appropriate or as they become topical – you know, whatever piece was just written for me, or something that I haven’t played in Montreal in 30 years and here I am playing it again, whatever. That I think will serve both sets of music pretty well.

Where to from here?

There’s always a fairly long shortlist of pieces that I want to be working on. It’s nicest when I don’t have a choice, it’s just like something I have to do. For instance, in mid-summer I had to do the Elliott Smith song “True Love,” there was just no question. And this is really terrible, because now I’m doing a cover of a cover — do you know the Tears for Fears song “Mad World,” which was part of the soundtrack to Donnie Darko? On the soundtrack it’s played on piano by Michael Andrews, but it’s originally the Tears for Fears song, sort of a poppy hit.

Right now, I’m more interested and curious and passionate about incorporating contemporary classical pieces into the pop repertoire that I have. I’m working on a set of seven canons — well, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is a canon, it’s not as complex as a fugue, but it still has the idea of a theme chasing itself. Kenneth Fuchs has written a piece called “Falling Man,” based on Don DeLillo’s novel, a piece for tenor and orchestra and some of the texts from that 9/11 novel. In working on the piece, Fuchs had themes that were running throughout the piece that he wanted to do a little more strictly, and he wanted to do them as canons. So he wrote a set of seven for me, and I’m going to be incorporating them into the programs going on right now.

There was a composer that Shostakovich proposed marriage to after his wife died, a young protégé of his, Galina Ustvolskaya. It’s acknowledged that Shosktakovich’s late pieces were influenced and inspired by her work, which is really very dark. And so there’s a place on my program for a little bit of that. There are other contemporary composers I’m interested in, such as Thomas Adés, an English composer who wrote a piece called “Darkness Visible,” based on John Dowland’s popular songs from the 17^th century. It’s an explosion in very revolutionary pianistic terms, and it fits very nicely into the programs that I’m doing because, again, it’s a radical reinterpretation of a popular song.

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