Art & Creativity Quote by Colin Greenwood

A musician admitting a book “had a big effect on us” is a quiet way of naming influence without turning it into a brand deal. Colin Greenwood isn’t selling you a reading list; he’s sketching a map of how a band learns to see. The specificity matters: Repeated Takes isn’t a generic “great novel,” it’s Michael Chanan’s thinking about film and television as constructed reality - how images are edited, replayed, framed, and made to feel inevitable. For an artist whose job is to build emotional truth out of arrangement and repetition, that’s not extracurricular. It’s workflow.

The phrase “we read” does cultural work, too. Greenwood’s not posing as the lone genius with a private canon. He’s pointing to a collective education, the band as a small institution that absorbs ideas together and metabolizes them into sound. That’s especially telling for Radiohead-adjacent mythology, which often treats their evolution as mystical. Greenwood swaps mysticism for method: big effects come from paying attention to how media manipulates attention.

“Repeated Takes” also smuggles in a self-portrait. Rock music lives on takes, retakes, versions, live re-recordings of the same feeling. Naming a book about repetition and mediation hints at an anxiety and fascination with the loop: how culture recycles images, how audiences replay, how artists revise. It’s a modest quote that lands like a manifesto for craft in an era obsessed with spontaneity and “authenticity.”