Jonny Greenwood on Why His New Album With Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express Took a Decade to Make and ‘Hoping to…

It took Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood more than a decade to follow acclaimed 2015 album “Junun.” A musician died. A pandemic intervened. And then there were the visas.

“Ranjha,” released last month via World Circuit/BMG, reunites Greenwood with Israeli musician Shye Ben Tzur — who divides his time between Israel and India — and their ensemble The Rajasthan Express for a follow-up to their debut. In the intervening years Greenwood has composed film scores, recorded “Jarak Qaribak” with Israeli rock musician Dudu Tassa, and played in The Smile with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke – but this is the project he kept coming back to.

Where “Junun” was recorded inside the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, “Ranjha” was made at Greenwood’s studio in Oxfordshire. “We wanted to give that privilege to the Indians, and have them live and work for a few weeks in the U.K.,” he says. “If a project is going to be collaborative, it felt like there should be a straight exchange of experience for all the musicians.”

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

The studio setting opened up sonic possibilities unavailable inside a fort. Tom Skinner – the jazz drummer who plays in The Smile alongside Greenwood and Thom Yorke – was brought in, and the ensemble’s 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.

Greenwood is frank about the practical obstacles the project required overcoming, including visas. “When we did the American tour and none of the musicians had passports, birthdays or in some cases addresses – things like that can complicate the process,” he says.

Making Indian music after a Western upbringing involves considerable unlearning of harmonic instinct. “It’s a world where major and minor chords mean nothing,” he says. “Rhythms are more complicated, and melodies more intricate — lots of Western harmonic rules make no sense. I find all that stuff very inspiring.”

On what keeps drawing him to these collaborations, Greenwood says: “It’s fear of missing out on never having worked with certain musicians, and in certain traditions. It’s like when you read a book or see a film set in a part of the world you’ve never been, and are unlikely to visit. That feeling of regret that you’ll never go, never understand that language.”

The album’s 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’s sincere Sufi faith is both humbling and inspiring. He describes faith as something close to the last taboo — 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. “If an English band just sang religious or spiritually inspired songs and poetry, it would be very unusual,” Greenwood says. “I’m not religious, but if anything were to tip me into faith it would come from music, not words.”

On the question of genre, Greenwood is wary of the cynicism that can greet Western artists collaborating with non-Western musicians — though he says that when it is approached with sincerity and enthusiasm, as with Damon Albarn’s 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 – a deliberate counterweight to world music recordings that sound “tame and glossy” or, worse, “bombastic and simplified.” “We’re just led by taste,” he says.

Greenwood is similarly unbothered by the algorithms that increasingly shape how audiences find music. “It’s just so far out of my hands,” he says.

He also addresses the question that follows him everywhere. In 2025, Radiohead toured across Europe — their first in seven years. “We had a really good experience touring again at the end of last year, and are hoping to do another,” he says. “It takes 18 months to plan and book each show, so we’d better get our skates on if we want to do one anytime soon.”