‘Sail to the Moon’: the most complicated song by Radiohead
Radiohead has never been satisfied with making simple rock and roll songs. They had arrived as the stereotypical alt-rock act in the 1990s, but as soon as they started to cover new territory on records like OK Computer and Kid A, there was no way they were going to kick back and write a song in 4/4 time with the same pop song chords everyone knows. Things had to be different now, but looking at their discography, Hail to the Thief might be their most musically cluttered album of their classic period.
That hardly means that it’s bad, though. There are many songs like ‘There There’ and ‘Go To Sleep’ that deserve to be remembered as much as their classic tunes, but all of the ideas on the record feels like two albums that were smushed together, with electronic songs like ‘Backdrifts’ appearing on the same record as ‘2+2=5’.
When listening to the tracks with organic instrumentation, Radiohead were proving that they could be a damn good rock and roll band again. Acts like Muse and Coldplay had been trying to ride their coattails ever since the 2000s, but none of them were going to be able to write something like ‘Myxomatosis’ or ‘A Punchup At A Wedding’. Outside of the copycats, not many people would have been able to make something as disorienting as ‘Sail to the Moon’.
While the song was a touching tune that Yorke wrote for his son during this time, the entire structure of the tune is a beautiful mess from back to front. Before the song even drops in, it seems to be in a fluid time signature, with each bar of the music changing the pulse of the song, where you can hardly tell where Yorke’s vocal is going to come in.
Since most of the track is coated with strange jazzy chords, it was never going to be a song meant for radio by any means, but Yorke’s vocal performance is what ties everything together half the time, serving as the perfect anchor for the rest of the instruments to build things on top of.
Which is fairly strange, given what singers should be known for. That’s normally the lead instrument everyone pays attention to, but since Yorke has a habit of holding on one note through a section, it gives him many opportunities to put different chords on top of his voice that have no other connective tissue other than the note he’s singing. And throughout the rest of the tune, he has a field day going through as many keys as he can.
Because, really, what key is ‘Sail to the Moon’ in? Technically, it would be easy to say that most of the song is in A, but given that it starts on a major seventh chord and then immediately goes into chords borrowed from A minor, there’s no telling where the track is going to go at any point. So with the strange chords happening throughout the tune and the ever-shifting time signatures, the song seems to have exhausted both music theory tricks it could pull, but in the outro, it ends up pivoting between three of the strangest chords that could be connected.
Listening back to the record, going from C major seven to E major seven to A flat major seven should make no logical sense, but given that the song is about Yorke going into orbit trying to reach the moon, the ending of the song may as well be the soundtrack to someone slowly drifting into space in a small rocketship as the dark void of the universe started coming into view.
It might be more than a little bit dark for people to take in all at once, but compared to many other Radiohead songs, ‘Sail to the Moon’ is a great way of showing people what the band is all about. They were never meant to be a pop band by any stretch, but for as complex as their songs could be, Yorke could always find a way to make the most dissonant chords sound heartbreakingly beautiful.
