The song too emotional for Radiohead to even talk about: “We were quite fragile”
When you’re working your way through the dense and diverse catalogue of Radiohead music, there are some moments that feel the calm in the eye of the storm. When the genre-bending is stripped away, and you’re left with something sparse, almost akin to a film score, you’re slapped in the face with overwhelming emotion.
There are many songs that fit this mould. ‘How To Disappear Completely’ and ‘True Love Waits’ are the two most obvious examples of this, showcasing their ability to convey something profoundly deep with an almost minimalist and atmospheric approach. Ultimately, it’s a soundscape in which Thom Yorke’s vocals often sound their very best, allowing the emotion of his performance to be on fully display.
While ‘True Love Waits’ is remembered as one of the most emotional moments in Radiohead’s discography and more specifically, their 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool, it was another from the record that Yorke himself would recall as the most emotionally impactful.
The second track from the album, ‘Daydreaming’, all built on the atmospheric piano part that Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood laid down, which almost feels like it straddles the line of a pleasant dream and a twisting nightmare, which Yorke’s voice tries to avoid throughout the entirety. Ultimately, the feel of the record and the session that created it feels at the very forefront of its entire make-up.
Greenwood explained, “[Thom] just came and sang. I mean he wrote the song, but I ended up playing the piano part and we presented him with this backing track to sing to, and I think that was kind of a nice change for him. He’s so used to having to start things off.”
It was a musically serendipitous moment, as Yorke had been craving an arrangement like that – without ever really saying it to the rest of the band. At the time they were recording A Moon Shaped Pool, he was going through a divorce from his wife of 23 years, who, heartbreakingly, passed away from cancer not long after.
Speaking of the time, Yorke said, “When the kids’ mum died, it was a very difficult period and we went through a lot.”
Adding, “It was very hard. She suffered a great deal and my ambition is to make sure that we have come out of it all right, and I hope that’s what’s happening.”
The arrangement provided by Greenwood and the band was the perfect landscape for Yorke to explore those emotions without any hesitation. As Greenwood recalled, Yorke simply came in and sang because of how the instrumentals coaxed the emotion out of him and, in turn, created this unfiltered demonstration of human vulnerability.
In the conclusion of the song, you can hear Yorke singing ‘half of my life’ and ‘half of my love’, played backwards, painfully ruminating on the feeling of grief, conflict and change that occurred during the making of this album. For Yorke and the band, the song and entire album were a cathartic exercise, ultimately answering some questions that existed within, but such is the nature of music stardom, they had to confront the fact that the release of A Moon Shaped Pool would come with plenty of media appearances and, in turn, questions. Questions, they weren’t yet ready to publicly answer.
“We weren’t in a position to really talk about A Moon Shaped Pool when it came out,” Ed O’Brien relayed to Rolling Stone. “We didn’t want to talk about it being quite hard to make. We were quite fragile, and we needed to find our feet. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, if that’s all right. I feel like the dust hasn’t settled. It was a hard time.”
The music did all the talking for the band, and the story of A Moon Shaped Pool’s influence was public enough for people to respect. As all great music does, it stood the test of time and served as a more succinct and fair representation of where Yorke was at in his life.
