Christopher O’Riley is a Los Angeles-based classically trained pianist whose homage to depressing pop artists has resulted in three (soon to be four) albums. Well-known for his covers of Radiohead songs (2003’s True Love Waits, 2005’s Hold Me to This), O’Riley also has reinterpreted the work of Elliott Smith (last year’s Home to Oblivion), and, on April 10, will release a collection of Nick Drake adaptations (Second Grace, which will include solo piano renditions of “Pink Moon,” “Northern Sky,” and “Place to Be,” among others). More important, O’Riley will perform with the Delaware Symphony Orchestra March 30-31 at the Grand Opera House. He will play German composer Richard Strauss’ Burlesque (which O’Riley calls a “harsh, romantic satire”), but, sadly, no Radiohead, Elliott Smith, or Nick Drake. To make up for this, O&A got O’Riley, who turns 50 next month, on the phone to discuss contemporary pop music, where his thoughts ranged from doubting the Arcade Fire to hating Coldplay to why Kid A works better than The Eraser.
|
When you go on tour, how do you decide when to do the classical pieces versus the Radiohead and Elliott Smith covers?
| I don’t really get to choose. It’s more a matter of what the venue wants me to perform. Sometimes I’ll get to do a mix of both, which I really enjoy. |
When did you first start listening to Radiohead?
I started reading about them before I heard them. It was when OK Computer came out [in 1997], and I was really interested in what I was reading. |
What’s your favorite Radiohead album?
| I’d say Kid A. It’s got a perfect balance of songwriting and these other things happening. I’m not a particular fan of the Thom Yorke solo record [last year’s The Eraser]. I think the songwriting got lost in the techno beats. But I also tend to be a snobby listener. I hate albums that have weak tracks, and that’s why I like Radiohead: They don’t really have any weak songs. |
When you’re learning these interpretations, how do you know what works and what doesn’t?
I look for melody and texture. With Radiohead, that works really well, because you’ve got five members in the band, and each of them is bringing something personable to it. There needs to be somewhere to go with these songs. That can’t happen with every band. Like Arcade Fire—I think that sound worked really well once [as in 2004’s Funeral], but I’m not sure it can work again with this second album [Neon Bible, due March 6], at least from what I’ve heard so far. |
Have you thought of covering other artists whose songs naturally lend themselves to piano? Like Nine Inch Nails, or Prince—they tend to write a lot of stuff on the keyboard.
Oh, sure. With someone like Prince, though, I don’t know how well that would work. I envision his songs having bigger arrangements that would be hard to pull off with just piano. |
If there’s a common theme running through these albums you’ve done and the artists you’ve chosen to cover, it’s that they all have this sense of melancholy, this heaviness to them. Are you more drawn to darker music?
| I don’t think it’s that I’m drawn to darker music, it’s that the artists I choose to cover have some interesting things going on. The reason Radiohead fans hate Coldplay, and why I hate Coldplay, is that Coldplay songs might work nicely at the prom, but I’m more interested in dichotomy. I like to explore the tension between things. |
Something else I noticed is that with these covers, you really take the sting out of the original songs. You have a way of smoothing things over.
| I think that comes from trying to approximate several sounds on one instrument. All I have is harmony. So with Radiohead, where you’ve got those noise elements, like in “Airbag,” sometimes I have to insinuate the beat by filling in the drum or bass parts. I’m trying to make up for the pantheon of colors the band uses, so I have to suggest these other sounds on the piano. |
Of these albums you’ve put out, what’s been the toughest song to learn?
| I struggled a lot with “Speed Trials” by Elliott Smith, just because of the sparseness of it. There was a lot of harmonic ambiguity there. But I know what songs will work before they’re recorded. If something’s not coming together, I won’t force it. |