Respected classical pianist Christopher O’Riley received accolades two years ago for his album “True Love Waits: Christopher O’Riley Plays Radiohead.” The response was so favorable that O’Riley has recently issued a follow-up, “Hold Me To This: Christopher O’Riley Plays Radiohead,” with a similar tribute to the late Elliot Smith, “Home to Oblivion,” coming in the spring of 2006.
“I play a lot of different repertoire, mostly classical, and I realized that in my off hours, I was listening mostly to Radiohead and a lot to Elliot Smith,” O’Riley tells Billboard.com. “So I started making my arrangements.”
In addition to the tributes, O’Riley also issues his own albums or original works by himself and with others. Additionally, he hosts a syndicated classical music radio show (“From the Top”), and has toured or performed as part of Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony.
Despite being such an accomplished musician and arranger, O’Riley admits experiencing some challenges while reworking rock artists’ material for piano.
“There have been Elliot Smith songs that I’ve done in a day, there are some — ‘Coast to Coast,’ from Elliot’s last record [2004’s ‘From a Basement on the Hill’] — took me a couple of weeks to get even a first draft done,” he says. “I won’t do a song unless I can make a version that excites me as much as listening to my favorite live version of the band doing it. One of the first songs I heard of Elliot Smith was ‘Speed Trials,’ so I was working on three or four songs, got back to revising a couple of them, and said, ‘This really sucks — I really can’t do this.’ It was a couple of months later I went back to it, and found something that I was happy with.”
With two albums in the shops and one on the way, O’Riley refuses to take a breather, as he already has his next two projects mapped out. A piano tribute to Nick Drake should appear in the winter of 2006, and a compilation of artists should appear in the spring of 2007. “I’ve done four or five of Nick Drake’s songs, and I’ve got a short list of about 18 or 20 that I want to do,” he says.
“There’s one song in particular that’s very encouraging from a piano standpoint, called ‘Three Hours,'” he continues. “There’s a version he did on his own, at home, and then there’s the released version on ‘Five Leaves Left.’ And my impression is that the studio version is not the ideal version — in the home version you had an impression of where the song could go, and in the studio, in my impression, there was a compromise. I’m in the position of trying to read what he had in mind and make it go in that direction.”
As for the compilation, O’Riley has some artists in mind: “R.E.M., Cocteau Twins, Tears for Fears, Tori Amos, George Harrison. Interpol is somebody I’m looking at. Basically, I’ll hear a song — it’ll be a song that I like — and then sometime down the line, I’ll hear a way that it can work on piano.”
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news