Jonny Greenwood Biography Quotes 19 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood, known as Jonny Greenwood, was born on November 5, 1971, in Oxford, England. The younger brother of bassist Colin Greenwood, he was drawn to music from childhood and received formal instruction that set him apart among his future bandmates. Greenwood studied classical instruments, performed in student ensembles, and developed fluency on guitar, keyboards, and woodwinds, alongside an early fascination with the ondes Martenot and electronic sound. At Abingdon School in Oxfordshire he met Thom Yorke, Ed OBrien, and Phil Selway, joining Colin to form a group that rehearsed on Fridays and took the name On a Friday. Briefly a university music student, Greenwood left his course when the band signed a recording contract, channeling his training into a life in popular and classical music.

Radiohead
When On a Friday became Radiohead in the early 1990s and signed with EMI, Greenwood emerged as the bands restless sonic explorer. Across albums such as Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OK Computer, he pushed beyond the role of lead guitarist, weaving in glockenspiel, analog synths, string arrangements, and disruptive textures that helped define the bands evolving sound. As Radiohead turned to radical hybrid forms on Kid A and Amnesiac, Greenwood embraced sampling, modular electronics, and orchestrations that complemented Thom Yorkes writing and vocals and deepened the contributions of Ed OBrien and Phil Selway. With longtime producer Nigel Godrich shaping the studio environment, Greenwood helped drive the bands shifts across Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows, The King of Limbs, and A Moon Shaped Pool, crafting parts that were both architecturally precise and emotionally direct.

Over years of touring, Greenwood managed a repetitive strain injury that altered his onstage approach and further encouraged his pivot to keyboards, software, and orchestral writing. He arranged and conducted strings on key tracks, and his ondes Martenot became a signature timbre in the bands repertoire. Within Radiohead, his intellectual rigor and curiosity balanced Yorkes lyrical abstraction and rhythm sections dynamics, while brother Colin remained a steady anchor on bass. The collective chemistry among the five members remained central to the bands longevity and artistic reinvention.

Instruments, Technique, and Aesthetic
Greenwood is renowned for treating the guitar as a laboratory more than a pedestal, using alternative tunings, feedback systems, and layered effects to reveal new harmonic colors. Equally at home with the ondes Martenot, he has fused early electronic expressivity with contemporary sound design. His classical background feeds his orchestrations: dense but legible counterpoint, string clusters influenced by 20th-century modernism, and rhythmic cells that lock to percussion or dissolve into ambient drift. He often favors analog equipment and tactile controllers, preferring the instability and personality of imperfect machines to purely digital precision. The result is a style that moves easily between aggression and austerity, capable of both granular detail and broad, lyrical sweep.

Classical and Film Composition
Parallel to his band work, Greenwood built a major career as a concert and film composer. Appointed composer-in-residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra in the mid-2000s, he wrote pieces such as smear and Popcorn Superhet Receiver, works that showcased his interest in microtonality, string resonance, and the expressive potential of sustained dissonance. His collaboration with the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki led to an acclaimed recording that paired Greenwoods orchestral pieces with Pendereckis, underlining a lineage from postwar avant-garde string writing to contemporary crossover practice.

His first feature-length score, Bodysong, demonstrated a fascination with documentary montage and modular composition. A long partnership with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson followed: Greenwood scored There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, and Phantom Thread, bringing austere strings, period-informed textures, and an ear for psychological tension to Andersons films. He later collaborated with Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here, with Jane Campion on The Power of the Dog, and with Pablo Larrain on Spencer, each project extending his palette while keeping his hallmark blend of clarity and unease. Performers from the London Contemporary Orchestra have been frequent collaborators, translating his notated ideas into vivid performance. Recognition for this body of work has included major award nominations, including Academy Award consideration, and a growing presence on concert stages and soundtrack catalogs.

Collaborations and Projects
Greenwood has pursued collaborations that cut across genres and geographies. With Israeli musician Shye Ben Tzur and Rajasthani artists of The Rajasthan Express, he helped create Junun, a project recorded in India and documented by Paul Thomas Anderson, in which North Indian traditions, Hebrew lyrics, and Greenwoods guitars and electronics coexisted fluidly. He has curated recordings, championed contemporary performers, and used his visibility to platform orchestral and chamber music outside the standard canon. Throughout, he has stayed close to Radioheads extended creative circle, including art collaborator Stanley Donwood and producer Nigel Godrich, even as he has sought out new ensembles and traditions.

In 2021 he formed The Smile with Thom Yorke and drummer Tom Skinner, a trio designed for agility and experimentation. Their recordings and performances, produced with Godrich, foreground polyrhythms, knotty guitar figures, and taut arrangements, a continuation of Greenwoods habit of finding fresh architectures for familiar instruments.

Personal Life and Character
Greenwood married the Israeli-born visual artist Sharona Katan, whose work has intersected with aspects of his musical life. Known for a reserved public profile, he tends to let recordings, scores, and live performances speak for him. Colleagues and collaborators often describe his combination of meticulous craft and playful curiosity: an artist as willing to study archival scores and early electronic instruments as to repurpose a small cassette recorder, a transistor radio, or a vintage synth for a new piece of music.

Impact and Legacy
As lead guitarist and sonic architect in the Grammy-winning band Radiohead, Greenwood helped reshape the vocabulary of alternative rock by integrating orchestral thought and electronic technique into song form. As a composer, he bridged concert music and cinema with a voice that is at once modern, lyrical, and psychologically acute. The web of people around him, Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood, Ed OBrien, Phil Selway, Nigel Godrich, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jane Campion, Lynne Ramsay, Pablo Larrain, Krzysztof Penderecki, and collaborators from the London Contemporary Orchestra and beyond, reflects a career animated by dialogue and exchange. Whether scoring a film, writing for strings, or devising a new guitar texture on stage, Jonny Greenwood has remained a singular figure whose work continues to influence musicians, composers, and filmmakers across generations.

Our collection contains 19 quotes who is written by Jonny, under the main topics: Music - Friendship - Art - Work Ethic.