{"id":548524,"date":"2026-06-22T16:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T16:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/548524\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T16:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T16:28:09","slug":"jonny-greenwood-on-new-album-ranjha-another-radiohead-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/548524\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonny Greenwood on New Album ‘Ranjha,’ Another Radiohead Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt took Radiohead<\/a> guitarist Jonny Greenwood<\/a> more than a decade to follow acclaimed 2015 album \u201cJunun.\u201d A musician died. A pandemic intervened. And then there were the visas.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRanjha<\/a>,\u201d released last month via World Circuit\/BMG, reunites Greenwood with Israeli musician Shye Ben Tzur<\/a> \u2014 who divides his time between Israel and India \u2014 and their ensemble The Rajasthan Express for a follow-up to their debut. In the intervening years Greenwood has composed film scores, recorded \u201cJarak Qaribak\u201d with Israeli rock musician Dudu Tassa, and played in The Smile with Radiohead\u2019s Thom Yorke \u2013 but this is the project he kept coming back to. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhere \u201cJunun\u201d was recorded inside the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, \u201cRanjha\u201d was made at Greenwood\u2019s studio in Oxfordshire. \u201cWe wanted to give that privilege to the Indians, and have them live and work for a few weeks in the U.K.,\u201d he says. \u201cIf a project is going to be collaborative, it felt like there should be a straight exchange of experience for all the musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe journey to the finished record was longer than anyone expected. One of the two qawwals \u2014 singers in the Sufi devotional tradition of qawwali \u2014 on the record, Zaki Sahib, died suddenly after a rehearsal in India during the preparation of new material. \u201cThis was devastating to us all,\u201d Greenwood says. Writing sessions had already begun more than five years before the album\u2019s completion, with work also interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The other qawwal, Zakir, is Zaki\u2019s brother; on \u201cRanjha,\u201d he plays a Moog synthesizer and a church organ for the first time.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe studio setting opened up sonic possibilities unavailable inside a fort. Tom Skinner \u2013 the jazz drummer who plays in The Smile alongside Greenwood and Thom Yorke \u2013 was brought in, and the ensemble\u2019s brass players, heirs to a tradition of Rajasthani musicians who adopted discarded British army instruments during the colonial era, were captured with the precision a controlled room allows.<\/p>\n

\n\tGreenwood is frank about the practical obstacles the project required overcoming, including visas. \u201cWhen we did the American tour and none of the musicians had passports, birthdays or in some cases addresses \u2013 things like that can complicate the process,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaking Indian music after a Western upbringing involves considerable unlearning of harmonic instinct. \u201cIt\u2019s a world where major and minor chords mean nothing,\u201d he says. \u201cRhythms are more complicated, and melodies more intricate \u2014 lots of Western harmonic rules make no sense. I find all that stuff very inspiring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn what keeps drawing him to these collaborations, Greenwood says: \u201cIt\u2019s fear of missing out on never having worked with certain musicians, and in certain traditions. It\u2019s like when you read a book or see a film set in a part of the world you\u2019ve never been, and are unlikely to visit. That feeling of regret that you\u2019ll never go, never understand that language.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe album\u2019s lyrics draw on Sufi poetry and the legend of Heer and Ranjha, but Greenwood is careful to frame his own relationship to that material. He is not religious, though he says Ben Tzur\u2019s sincere Sufi faith is both humbling and inspiring. He describes faith as something close to the last taboo \u2014 almost no one in Western music sings exclusively about it, and when they do it tends to be self-referential, thanking God for their career at an award ceremony. Ben Tzur, he notes, never sings about himself. \u201cIf an English band just sang religious or spiritually inspired songs and poetry, it would be very unusual,\u201d Greenwood says. \u201cI\u2019m not religious, but if anything were to tip me into faith it would come from music, not words.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the question of genre, Greenwood is wary of the cynicism that can greet Western artists collaborating with non-Western musicians \u2014 though he says that when it is approached with sincerity and enthusiasm, as with Damon Albarn\u2019s experiences in Mali, it can only be considered worthwhile. He also points out that cultural cross-fertilization of this kind is nothing new: the brass instruments his Indian collaborators play descend directly from the trumpets and euphoniums left behind by the British army during the Raj. Their recording touchstones, he says, are Can, the Velvet Underground and Steve Albini \u2013 a deliberate counterweight to world music recordings that sound \u201ctame and glossy\u201d or, worse, \u201cbombastic and simplified.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re just led by taste,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tGreenwood is similarly unbothered by the algorithms that increasingly shape how audiences find music. \u201cIt\u2019s just so far out of my hands,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also addresses the question that follows him everywhere. In 2025, Radiohead toured across Europe \u2014 their first in seven years. \u201cWe had a really good experience touring again at the end of last year, and are hoping to do another,\u201d he says. \u201cIt takes 18 months to plan and book each show, so we\u2019d better get our skates on if we want to do one anytime soon.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood more than a decade to follow acclaimed 2015 album \u201cJunun.\u201d A musician…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,32541,337,9492,235193,235194],"class_list":["post-548524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jonny-greenwood","tag-music","tag-radiohead","tag-ranjha","tag-shye-ben-tzur"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116794707324366324","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}