Do you guys sit around and think, "lets come up with a new arrangement or a new way to do this song live?"

Yeah, definitely. One of the coolest things about having Eric Johnson in the band is that he's a real piano player -- that's his thing. Piano changes the whole feel. Instead of an acoustic guitar or rhythm guitar leading things, its his piano. We've done that to a few songs. During the recording process, there's a lot of thought about arrangement, too, and what the songs need. It's funny how you can sit down with a guitar and come up with chords and a melody then try to turn it into something with production value, and it just doesn't work. And just by experimenting and thinking about it long enough, you can find a way to make it work. That's one of the most enjoyable parts of the recording process.

You don't hear a song in its entirety in your head, completely mapped out and arranged with all its various parts?

Only once in a while is there something like that that ends up actually working. Most of the time I have an idea I want to pursue, then for some reason or another it needs something different. That's the whole game.

Would you say songs usually start with lyrical ideas then?

I start out with an acoustic guitar playing just chords and some sort of rhythm, trying to find a chord and rhythm structure. And then I always hum melodies. I really let the melody lead the whole process.

Without words ever being involved until you worked that part out?

Right until the end. Even until the recording process the words are being worked out.

"Wincing The Night Away is the last record you're obligated to make for Sub Pop. With such a big cult following are you going to pull a Radiohead now for the next one, and release it yourselves?

I don't know! Is that going to be an industry standard now? I don't know what we are going to do. Sub Pop would like to work with us, and I'd like to work with them too. It's just that there are so many opportunities right now we'd have to figure something out that is kind of lucrative and so on.

You're not necessarily looking to harness your following to make a paradigm shift?

Yeah, I think it's time to think about all that. This time off we have now will be used to try to figure out what we want to do.

It seems as if it would be crazy these days not to do it yourself.

I know, that's the other thing. We have to take advantage of the fact we have a name that's established. You're right. There's so many ways of distributing and marketing yourself now, on your own or with the help of management. It must be scary as hell for the big labels.

If the average price paid to Radiohead online was about two dollars -- which is probably a conservative estimate based on what I've read -- they would still have made more on In Rainbows than they had on any other LP in their entire careers.

Because of the huge amount of money they used to have to give to their label.

Right. And there's no sort of costs against it -- you don't need to print a million copies to get them into distribution channels and all that.

You're right. When you listen to the old guard talk about the changes in the music industry, they're just like, "It's horrible, it's a disaster for the music industry. I guess they're right if they are just thinking about numbers counters and the people who, like themselves, want to make money of this thing. I think for artists, though, it's kind of dreamy.