The 2000 song Thom Yorke said everyone got wrong: “The face I had for three years”
When Thom Yorke writes lyrics, he never has a story in mind – while other musicians, like aggro-rock king Jack White or rock opera visionary Pete Townshend, might want a story with a start, middle, and end, Yorke has always favoured abstract non-sequiturs and fragmented, disjointed ideas. Radiohead’s sound thrives amid such semantic ambiguity.
In this way, the British singer-songwriter has always favoured metaphor over literal interpretation, and this is most evident on the unsettling, hypnotic 2000 track, ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, which suggests, contrary to the deterministic title, that things aren’t as they seem.
After repeating the album title, Kid A, as well as the track’s title, Yorke offers one of three statements that make up the song – “Yesterday, I woke up sucking on a lemon” – in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2001, he recalled, “Lots of people say that song is gibberish… It’s not.”
Though British people would be familiar with the strange citrus symbolism, Yorke clarified the saying to be on the safe side: “In England, ‘sucking a lemon’ refers to the face you pull because a lemon is so tart. That’s the face I had for three years,” he revealed.
Audiences overseas were quick to paint the phrase as a nonsensical embodiment of his lack of creative clarity, but Yorke had put the phrase there for a reason, as he was inspired by the bleakness he felt during the OK Computer tour, frustrated and alienated despite getting everything he thought he wanted – however, including the line originally took some encouragement from producer Nigel Godrich, who was alone with Yorke when they were working on the beloved tune.
Speaking to Interview Magazine, Godrich reminisced, “Thom always used to just carry notebooks with him everywhere we went. We’d be eating, and he writes stuff down all the time. For ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, it was just me and him in a room, and he’s like, ‘Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon… Oh, I can’t say that.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, you can. That’s great.’”
At this time of writing, Yorke would pull on the techniques of Dadaism, the radical anti-art movement driven by the disgust of the horrors of World War I, where aesthetics were pushed towards an arena of absurdity and chance.
Therefore, if critics were tarnishing the lyrics with the “gibberish” label, they weren’t actually far from the truth – rather, they’d imbued that comment with a derogatory tone, whereas Yorke, like his nonsense predecessors before him, wanted to expand, explode, and interrogate the literal act of making meaning by stringing words together to form sense.
At a time when the world wasn’t making much sense to Yorke, where he might as well have been dining on alienation and disillusionment for breakfast, a surface-level obscurity or tension in understanding perfectly replicates his struggle.
Beyond the 2000 hit, this approach is all over Kid A. On ‘In Limbo’, Yorke repeats the line “You’re living in a fantasy world“. This is a view he spins upon himself, time and time again. The joke is on us if we can’t figure that one out.
