Creativity Quote by Colin Greenwood

Name-dropping Bill Withers and Curtis Mayfield isn’t a nostalgia flex; it’s a quiet mission statement. Colin Greenwood could have cited bass heroes in the obvious lane, the guys famous for virtuoso speed or slap acrobatics. Instead he points to two songwriter-producers whose grooves were engineered to carry meaning. Withers and Mayfield treated the low end like moral infrastructure: warm, firm, unshowy lines that make a song feel truthful, even when the lyric is bitter.

The intent here is almost corrective. Greenwood frames his bass education as learning how to serve a composition, not how to dominate it. “Informed me” signals apprenticeship more than fandom: a set of values absorbed through listening. Withers’ recordings often hinge on pocket and restraint, where the bass doesn’t call attention to itself so much as make the vocal feel inevitable. Mayfield’s arrangements, by contrast, are politically charged elegance - bass lines that glide, insist, and subtly agitate, suggesting uplift and unease at once. Put them together and you get a blueprint for emotional propulsion without melodrama.

In context, it’s also a wink at what Radiohead’s rhythm section does best: making experimental music feel physical. Greenwood’s bass parts often sit slightly sideways to the guitar haze, giving the songs a pulse you can trust even when everything else destabilizes. Citing Withers and Mayfield situates that instinct in Black American soul and funk lineage - an acknowledgment that “alternative” cool has always borrowed its backbone from somewhere deeper.