The artist that changed Thom Yorke’s approach to songwriting: “He’s improvising”
While some musicians are eternally comfortable staying in their own lanes with regard to trying out different styles of music, others are constantly searching for ways to keep things fresh and reinvent themselves by experimenting with new techniques. Throughout his career, Thom Yorke has undergone many transitional periods and dramatic changes in sound, and it’s because of this that he has managed to retain the interest of fans and repeatedly garnered critical acclaim for his flexible approach to his craft.
During the early years of Radiohead, Yorke was largely taking cues from the American alternative scene, applying elements of the Seattle grunge sound and the college rock that was popularised by the likes of Pixies and REM to the band’s sound. Debut album Pablo Honey was decidedly rough around the edges, but on subsequent releases such as The Bends and OK Computer, they successfully managed to refine their sound and eventually became the band that was passing on their own influence to the next generation of indie rock acts.
However, this pigeonholing of their sound irritated Yorke and the rest of the band, and in an attempt to broaden their horizons and steer themselves further away from what they considered to be a stagnating scene. With that, their next couple of releases in Kid A and Amnesiac saw the band incorporate elements of electronic, jazz and kosmiche music, and releases beyond that were further characterised by their desire to continue experimenting with styles that were new to them.
This carried over into Yorke’s solo output, and on his third studio album, 2019’s Anima, he delved much further into the realm of electronic music than ever before. The record presented listeners with a blend of techno, ambient, and glitch influences and was considered one of the strongest releases of his career to be released without the backing of his normal group of bandmates.
“We suddenly realised this is a new way to write stuff.”
Thom yorke
A large amount of this influence can be traced back to the music of artists such as Burial and Four Tet, although one producer in particular who was hugely influential to the direction that Yorke took on this album was Los Angeles-based musician Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus. Speaking to Crack Magazine during the album’s press cycle, Yorke opened up on how witnessing FlyLo’s live performances dramatically altered his writing process and shared his thoughts on the transformative nature of his shows.
“We watched him with his live set-up performing all his loops and thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting,’ because it’s a live performance, he’s improvising,” Yorke explained to the magazine. “We suddenly realised this is a new way to write stuff.” The “we” in this instance refers to him and producer Nigel Godrich, whom Yorke said he was regularly sending “unfinished, sprawling tracks” to for him to scour them for the best ideas and work into samples and loops.
Yorke and Ellison may have worked together in the past, with the former having provided guest vocals on the song ‘…And the World Laughs With You’ for Flying Lotus’ 2010 album, Cosmogramma, but witnessing his unusual approach shifted his perspective entirely. Without having been privy to this live experience, the sound of Anima could have been a completely different experience.
