The 2007 song Thom Yorke was never comfortable with: “Too feminine”
Nothing about Radiohead was about trying to make traditional pop tunes.
They had started their career trying to do that, and even if they did have a massive hit with ‘Creep’, Thom Yorke didn’t want to keep living his life based on one great 1990s classic. He had the potential to turn the band into something much greater than any of them could have imagined, but he did have more than a few problems with his own voice when they first began laying down a bunch of their classic tunes.
Then again, Yorke’s voice has always been the greatest strength of the band. No one else was coming anywhere close to what he was doing during the early 1990s. Everyone was already trying to do a halfhearted impression of Eddie Vedder by that point, and when you look at how Yorke’s voice soared over every member of the band, it really helped give them a shot in the arm on their classics.
No one would have been able to go through the gorgeous vocal jumps on ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ or ‘High and Dry’, but Yorke knew that there were limits on where his voice could go. He already sounded like the most depressed choirboy that anyone had ever heard, but when you listen to Kid A, it was as if he was trying to do absolutely everything he could to destroy that impression of himself.
Their 2000 masterpiece is the kind of album that doesn’t even sound like it wants people to listen to it, but them embracing electronics was the only way that they could have stayed sane at that point. They had spent years trying to become one of the biggest rock and roll bands in the world, and when they decided they didn’t want to do that anymore, it made a lot more sense for them to scale things back.
But ever since that change, In Rainbows is still one of the most perfect marriages of both of their styles. They have always been on the cusp of making a true return to form, but aside from the rockers on that record like ‘Bodysnatchers’ and ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’, ‘Nude’ feels like a song that feels like it’s pulled directly from their glory period. Which makes a lot of sense considering it dated all the way back to OK Computer.
Yorke’s vocals on the track don’t sound all that different from what he was doing on the high harmonies in ‘Climbing Up the Walls’, but he felt that the song was too much of a challenge for him to turn into a classic, saying, “Ten years ago, when we first had the song, I didn’t enjoy singing it because it was too feminine, too high. It made me feel uncomfortable. Now I enjoy it exactly for that reason – because it is a bit uncomfortable, a bit out of my range, and it’s really difficult to do. And it brings something out in me.”
It’s hard to even tell what he’s saying half the time on this tune, but in this case, that’s not actually a bad thing. There are definitely some lyrical gems in there if you want to look for them, but Yorke is practically using his voice as just another instrument in the band half the time on this track, bobbing and weaving throughout the tune before reaching one of the most beautiful climaxes that they have ever laid down.
He may have taken his sweet time trying to get everything sounding perfect, but ‘Nude’ wasn’t meant to just be any other Radiohead ballad. This was them making sense of what made them great back in 1997, and after over a decade apart from each other, you can hear Yorke finally starting to have fun again with this gem.
