You could come up with a very long list of hit songs that were started in Apple’s GarageBand – famously, Rihanna’s 2007 smash Umbrella is built on one of its stock drum loops – which makes it all the more surprising that, when Harry Styles told Thom Yorke that he uses the iPhone version of the software to get his ideas down, the Radiohead frontman’s jaw almost hit the floor.
The exchange came during the pair’s Musicians on Musicians interview for Rolling Stone, and began when Styles admitted that his laptop has been dead for about six years.
“I don’t know where the charger is,” he confessed. “We can help you with that,” replied Yorke, who then wondered where Styles records his song ideas if he doesn’t have a functioning computer.
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“On my phone,” Styles told him. “I use GarageBand a lot.”
This revelation left Yorke open-mouthed: “You should keep that to yourself, dude,” he chortled, the suggestion being Styles had committed some kind of embarrassing creative faux pas.
Respectfully, we’d disagree: whether you’re using it on Mac, iPad or iPhone, GarageBand is a great song-starting platform, giving you everything you need to make a musical idea a reality. And if you do need more functionality, you can open up the project in Logic Pro and develop it further.
A slightly bashful Styles went on to say that he also uses Apple’s Voice Memos – another app that’s loved by many songwriters and has a variety of musician-friendly features.
“Wow,” replied Thom, which led to Styles conceding that his methods are somewhat primitive. “In a way that’s good,” Thom told him, though he didn’t say exactly how.
After being on the receiving end of that gentle ribbing, we’re pleased to be able to report that Styles managed to land a burn of his own when Yorke revealed that he used to record his ideas to MiniDisc. Styles said that he remembers that format, too – “from being in primary school.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Yorke discussed his current recording habits, revealing that he always travels with a laptop. “There’s upsides to it and downsides to it, to be honest, because it means you’ve got everything at your fingertips, so you can fiddle endlessly – like, get really excited about a synth sound,” he explained.
On the downside, Yorke believes that these endless possibilities “encourage obsessive tendencies, which is not good.”
Yorke also told the story of the moment he was introduced to Pro Tools, which came when Radiohead were recording their 2000 album, Kid A, with producer Nigel Godrich.
“When when we were doing Kid A, Nigel had the first Pro Tools setup, because we were having to record strings – we couldn’t get them on to the tape,” he remembered. “And I was like, ‘I need that’, because because I was always a bit of a computer head. So when I saw that in the studio, I just wanted to learn it immediately, and that really changed how I thought about music straight away. Suddenly, I have a multitrack in in my bag.”
