In early 2019, I was fortunate to strike up an email correspondence with David Berman, the great songwriter and poet famous for fronting the indie-rock band Silver Jews.
At the time, Berman had not put out any new music in more than a decade. This diminished him in the larger music world, especially since his albums for many years weren’t available on streaming services, which essentially rendered him invisible to 99 percent of music fans. But for the remaining 1 percent, Berman’s untimely departure only heightened his mystique. He had retired his band, as he wrote in a note posted on the Silver Jews website, in protest over his father’s long career as a lobbyist for corporations that sold guns, cigarettes, and other cultural destroyers. He pledged to do as much as he could to fix the damage his father had wrought, though it was unclear how not writing songs would play into that.
But that was then. Now Berman was preparing to return to public life. He had a new album, he explained in an introductory email, recorded under the name Purple Mountains. (He suspected that “Silver Jews” as a moniker wouldn’t fly in more sensitive times.) While I had never met him, he felt compelled to reach out because he noticed that I had tweeted some nice things about Silver Jews in the past. Though, to be honest, I couldn’t recall exactly what. Keep in mind: I have a bad habit of listening to songs that I love while I’m drinking, and then going on Twitter to share these fascinating developments. I’m sure I had been up one night a few years ago sipping whiskey and listening to American Water, and that’s what brought David Berman to my email box.
If you know anything about Berman, you’re also aware of how this story ends. In August of 2019, his body was found in a Brooklyn apartment. The self-titled Purple Mountains LP had come out just one month prior, to great critical acclaim. He was about to launch his first tour in many years. Instead, he hanged himself. He was fifty-two years old.
When someone dies, any encounter you had with that person instantly takes on great significance. You can’t help but wonder if this conversation or that seemingly casual aside can explain why it happened. I won’t do that with David Berman. However, there is one aspect of our encounters—which included a handful of emails and an intense ninety-minute phone interview—that has stuck with me. You could even say I’m “haunted” by it, though it’s more curious than troubling.
It has to do with the question of when great artists start to suck.
Those are his words, not mine. Berman was obsessed with this question. He brought it up often in our emails, and it became one of the primary topics of our interview. “I guess when I was younger I always wondered, why do they always suck after thirty? After forty?” he said to me. “I don’t know if I know the answer, but I know the solution.”
For Berman, it had everything to do with time. When you’re young, you have it to burn. And if you write and record songs for a living, you put almost all of that time into your art. If you have any talent at all, the benefit of putting so much time into one thing is that you produce the best work of your life. And you get a buzz from that creation that you can’t get anyplace else.
But once you achieve greatness, what is the incentive to achieve it a second time? Or the tenth time? Or the forty-seventh time? At some point, the buzz just isn’t there. If you manage to become successful, it’s even harder to put so much of your time into that one thing.
As you get older, your perspective naturally changes. You still care about your art, but it’s not the only thing you care about anymore. You might meet someone with whom you want to start a family. Now your partner and the children command most of your attention. These are new challenges in life, beyond the worlds of art you’ve already traversed and, in a sense, conquered.
To be great as a middle-aged artist, Berman concluded, “you have to put in a lot more time.” Even if it comes at the expense of other parts of your life. Though for Berman, as he later explained to me, there were no other parts of his life. His marriage had recently ended, and he was living in a spare room at the offices of his record label, the Chicago-based indie Drag City. “I’m pretty solitary,” he said.
I bring up this (tragic and depressing) anecdote because it helps to explain what happened to Radiohead in 2004.
That spring, the band embarked on the final leg of the Hail to the Thief tour, traveling from Japan to Australia to California, where they wrapped up the run at Coachella. While the tour doesn’t look especially rigorous on paper, Thom Yorke later explained that these dates were brutal for the band.
“We flew the wrong way ’round the world,” he told Mojo, “and ended up so jet-lagged, we never actually slept. Basically it was three or four weeks of constant sleep deprivation and illness. It was just shite. That tour was our last obligation and… it had stopped being fun.”
After playing Coachella in May, Radiohead entered an unprecedented period of inactivity. No concerts to play, no album to make, no real reason to be a band. Their record deal with EMI had finally expired. They were now free agents without any obligations or deadlines. And, almost immediately, this newfound freedom started to erode Radiohead’s very foundation.
For about nine months, Radiohead was dormant. The band members said later that they tended to their personal lives. By then, everyone was either married or entrenched in a long-term relationship. Each member of Radiohead also had at least two children. They now had the money and status to not tour or do any work at all. They could afford to put their time elsewhere.
Meanwhile Thom Yorke, who initially saw the lack of commitments as a blessing, was slowly being driven up a wall. He has been described by his partners in Radiohead as the band’s most compulsively creative member, the one who is always scribbling down ideas and working through song ideas on his laptop. But now that his band had decided to unplug for an indefinite period, he found himself feeling incredibly depressed.
“I lost my confidence in all of it, I mean for about a year,” he told the New York Times. “I used to bore my friends stupid in the pub.”
Yorke had also battled depression in the aftermath of OK Computer, back when he was convinced that Radiohead had to dramatically remake itself into something utterly unlike Radiohead on their next album, Kid A. But this was different. In 1999, Radiohead almost broke up because they weren’t sure if they had what it took to follow up the most significant album of their lives. But five years later, the fate of Radiohead again hung in the balance, because they were now the band that made OK Computer and Kid A. And, maybe, there was nothing else left to say. Perhaps it was now more important to focus more on life outside the band.
Of course, Radiohead did eventually reassemble, and they made one of their most beloved albums, 2007’s In Rainbows. Though it proved to be a grind to create, taking more than two years. (“We’d all stopped to have kids. When we got back into the studio, it was just dead,” Yorke told Rolling Stone.) In the process, they discovered there was still some unfinished business to address.
“I never felt we were one of the great bands, up there with The Smiths or R.E.M., you know,” Ed O’Brien confessed to Mojo in 2008. “In my view, we’ve made three really great records, The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. What we needed was another great record just to seal it.”
Back in 2004, there was another crucial turning point for Radiohead that would extend beyond even In Rainbows. It was the beginning of projects outside of the band taking on greater significance, to the point of outnumbering Radiohead’s rather meager output—just three studio albums in the latter half of the aughts and all of the ’10s—during their “mid” period.
For Yorke, this meant finally getting to work on the debut solo LP that he had been contemplating since the Kid A era. The resulting album, The Eraser, would take the advancements of Kid A to their logical conclusion—instead of one of the world’s greatest guitar bands twisting itself in knots in order to not sound like a guitar band, Yorke could literally dig out riffs and stray rhythm parts recorded by his bandmates and stored away on his laptop, and assemble them in any order he pleased, like a DJ rummaging through vinyl for the perfect sample.
In this way, The Eraser wasn’t a true solo record at all, since Yorke often drew on instrumentals that had been performed by Radiohead. For the title track, he rearranged a series of piano chords played by Jonny Greenwood, and put them together into a new melody. The album’s most Radiohead-like tune, “Black Swan”—which sounds like a close cousin of “I Might Be Wrong”—is built upon a groove performed by O’Brien and Phil Selway. Two other tracks, “And It Rained All Night” and “Harrowdown Hill,” derived in some way from Hail to the Thief—the former was based on a highly discombobulated sample of “The Gloaming,” the other was a demo that the band ultimately couldn’t make work.
The album started as a diversion while Yorke waited to reconvene with Radiohead. Later, as he finished up The Eraser during breaks from the In Rainbows sessions, it was a way to feel productive as the band struggled to regain creative momentum after the prolonged break.
“There was a lot of me trying to pick myself up off the floor,” he told the New York Times. “Because I really sort of dropped—what’s the word? sunk—dropped down and went into this big lull and couldn’t do anything.”
Yorke subsequently explained that the title track was about the mass delusion that obscures the scariest existential threats in modern life, a callback to the recurring “this isn’t happening” motifs of Kid A. There might have also been a sense for Yorke that his band was in danger of being erased, no matter the overpowering insistence of his creative impulses at the time. The more you try to erase Thom, the more his ideas will appear on his own solo record.
Yorke eventually enlisted Nigel Godrich to work as an editor and sounding board. It was Godrich who pushed Yorke to leave his voice relatively unadorned, a departure from the constant sonic fuckery that Yorke felt compelled to apply to his vocals after OK Computer. (“It annoys me how pretty my voice is,” he griped to the New York Times.) Yorke originally hadn’t planned on putting vocals on his new music at all, but he soon realized that his voice provided a through-line for the album that held the songs together.
“In the band he’s always finding ways to bury himself,” Godrich explained to the Los Angeles Times. “Being a big fan of his voice and his songs, I wanted to push that. It would have been sad if he’d just made an oblique record. But because it was predominantly electronic, I had a really good excuse to make his voice dry and loud.”
For Yorke, The Eraser became a kinder, gentler Kid A, “something really direct,” as he told the Los Angeles Times, adding sardonically, “Someone might even understand it the first time around.” While working with Radiohead in the studio had always been in some way torturous and time-consuming—which they tried to remedy by making Hail to the Thief so quickly, to their later chagrin—Yorke knocked out The Eraser in just seven weeks. He found that coming up with songs on his own was relatively easy—“so easy, you think it must be cheating,” he said.
Upon its release in July of 2006, The Eraser naturally drew comparisons to Kid A. But as a piece of electronic music, it actually went much further than Kid A did, more closely resembling the Warp Records artists that enamored Yorke so much in 1998 and ’99 than anything he worked up with the band.
As a metaphor for artistic reinvention, however, The Eraser was a far cry from Kid A. In the end, the significance of Kid A for Radiohead was the process they put themselves through in order to make it—they questioned everything, from their methods to their very reasons for being in a band at all. It was a self-inflicted trial by fire in which the relevance of Radiohead in the eyes of the members themselves was put on the line. The struggle was the point. Whereas with The Eraser, the chance to make music without the typical headaches of a Radiohead project was the draw.
No wonder it ultimately felt like cheating. When Yorke came out the other side, he found it was “suddenly easy to delineate how the band works as opposed to just me going off and doing my own thing,” he said in an interview with Mojo. “Because it got to the point where I was sitting in a room across from Nigel and he’d be asking me, ‘So how do we achieve this drum part you want?’ And I frankly didn’t have a clue.”
Yorke spoke publicly on the inner workings of Radiohead during the press cycle for The Eraser, giving fans the clearest picture yet of his dynamic with Jonny Greenwood. To the New York Times, he admitted that he couldn’t read or write music. “If someone lays the notes on a page in front of me, it’s meaningless,” he said. “Because to me you can’t express the rhythms properly like that. It’s a very ineffective way of doing it, so I’ve never really bothered picking it up.” He also claimed that Jonny was “absolutely adamant that I should not learn to read music. He wants me to be the idiot savant.”
Of course Greenwood had been dabbling in proper music notation since The Bends, when he wrote the string parts for “Fake Plastic Trees.” Then, on Kid A, he worked with an orchestra for the first time. Several years after that, in 2003, he composed his first film score, for the documentary Bodysong. While not a proper solo album, Bodysong sounds very much like the ultimate sideman’s record. The pieces don’t really register as songs, but as evocative assemblages of incredible sounds—there’s some heart-stopping classical music in the style of Krzysztof Penderecki, some Bitches Brew jazz, a bit of skronky guitar, and a whole lot of irregular electronic beats.
While Bodysong pre-dates The Eraser by three years, Greenwood was loath to describe it as a solo album. “I did music for a film but that’s different to cobbling together 50 minutes of music with your name on it and expecting people to listen to it. That doesn’t interest me at all,” he told Mojo. Indeed, the music on Bodysong—as strange and wonderful as it is—is clearly intended to complement a primary voice. As he does with Yorke’s songs, Greenwood works in the margins, adding myriad strange details and grace notes that keep listeners returning to what otherwise might be a conventional pop song.
While Yorke pushed himself toward even greater insularity on The Eraser, Greenwood eventually sought to enter a different kind of collaboration. In writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, he found his surrogate, cinematic Thom Yorke. “I knew there were arrangements that he had done within those Radiohead songs that obviously said he could do more than just play guitar in a band,” Anderson later told the New York Times. “And I thought, If the opportunity arises, I bet he could do something interesting on a film score. I was just sort of waiting for the opportunity.”
The first score that Greenwood wrote for Anderson, for 2007’s There Will Be Blood, is—along with The Eraser—the greatest music that any member of Radiohead has made outside of the group. Greenwood, who went on to score PTA’s next three films, likened their partnership to a band, perhaps because that’s all he had ever known going back to his teen years in On a Friday. He was comfortable with his role as a fixer who helps bring to life the musings of a genius misanthrope obsessed with how capitalism and technology are ruining the environment and the greater human spirit. Jonny had done it with Thom on Kid A, and now he was making There Will Be Blood, a turn-of-the-century morality tale that begins in 1898—one hundred years before the end of the OK Computer tour—with Kid PTA.
As a composer, Greenwood naturally loved how loud Anderson lets the music play in his films, sometimes even allowing the score to drown out his own dialogue. In There Will Be Blood, Anderson gives Greenwood a grand entrance at the start of the movie, an opening on an ominous mountain—add snow, and it would directly evoke the cover of Kid A—set to the Penderecki-like squalls of the score. Soon, we’ll see Daniel Plainview digging his well and making his fortune. This is a man already driven mad by his own greed—when he breaks his legs after falling down the well, he drags himself on his back over that very mountain in order to have his fortune affirmed.
A century later, the world that men like Daniel Plainview created will seem so perverse and gross and frankly terrifying to an English rock band that they will be driven to make cut-and-paste protest songs inspired by the slow suffocation of global commerce.
When I watch There Will Be Blood and hear Greenwood’s music, I imagine I’m hearing part of a Radiohead album, just as I do whenever I put on The Eraser. Sometimes I imagine putting them together, the laptop record of chopped-and-reconfigured Radiohead riffs with the Penderecki homages creeping in from the fringes. The great, lost Radiohead album.
The LP that Radiohead eventually put out, In Rainbows, doesn’t really sound like that, of course. It is instead the most melodic, effervescent, and lived-in music they’ve ever made. As natural as breathing in and out, it flows out of the speakers like rays of light. It is, in many ways, the yang to Kid A’s yin, as warm and welcoming as its predecessor is cold and foreboding. In time, In Rainbows would come to overshadow Kid A for many Radiohead fans.
This is based purely on anecdotal evidence, but it has been so overwhelmingly true in my experience that I’m inclined to take it as broadly true: In Rainbows is the consensus choice for “best” Radiohead album. This is especially true for Millennials and Generation Z, who no doubt flock to In Rainbows because it was the first Radiohead album that was “theirs.” They were too young to scour the Internet for illegal downloads of Kid A back in 2000, and The Bends and OK Computer already sounded “too ’90s” by the mid-aughts. But In Rainbows, as music and a moment, hit that generation just right.
If Kid A rescued Radiohead from being known strictly as a ’90s band, In Rainbows ensured that they would belong to multiple generations. The uniqueness of this achievement can’t be overstated. Virtually no other band from Radiohead’s peer group was able to pull it off. While there are fans of Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth, and R.E.M. from younger generations, it’s generally understood that those are Gen-X bands. Their classic work was released during a relatively concentrated period of time, usually over the course of a decade. For Radiohead, there’s a similar span of time between OK Computer and In Rainbows. And yet that decade, which straddles two centuries, also represents a very long bridge between two completely different eras. There was no guarantee that a twenty-one-year-old in 2007 was going to care about OK Computer and Kid A. But In Rainbows connected that person to those records.
The age of this hypothetical music fan is important. For a band to matter to a particular generation, they have to put out a culturally significant record when those people are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. OK Computer will probably always be my favorite Radiohead record, because it dropped when I was about to turn twenty. The micro-generation of music fans slightly younger than me, which includes the first group of kids for whom it was common to have email addresses and access to Napster in high school, had Kid A. And the kids who came of age during the last great indie-rock boom had In Rainbows. None of their contemporaries could pull that off for Millennials. But Radiohead somehow made it across that twentieth-/twenty-first-century, Gen-X/Millennial divide. Which is why, a full decade after In Rainbows, Radiohead remained one of the only rock bands on Earth that could credibly headline an otherwise rock-averse festival like Coachella. What other band still seems like they belong to everybody?
The wonder of In Rainbows is that it proved to be as difficult to make as any Radiohead album. The record’s sweet lightness belied the torturous two-years-plus ordeal required to finish it. Ultimately, In Rainbows took about as long to complete as Kid A and Amnesiac. Though, unlike those records, the struggle over In Rainbows played out in public, via the band’s own Dead Air Space blog and interviews that Yorke conducted while promoting The Eraser. Yorke’s first solo record was itself a kind of subtweet about how difficult it was to get anything done in Radiohead.
“We lost all momentum and it’s very, very difficult to get momentum back,” Yorke complained to the New York Times in 2006. “When I say momentum, I don’t just mean the physically working every day, I mean just hanging out and playing each other music and swapping ideas and stuff. It’s something that you take for granted until it’s gone. And then you’re like: ‘What’s wrong? There’s something wrong here.’”
Whereas British music magazines were forced to dispatch reporters to Oxford to literally knock on doors in order to collect any stray scrap of information about Kid A and Amnesiac, Radiohead fans had a clear picture of just how much trouble Radiohead was having in the studio with In Rainbows long before they heard the record. The accounts from various press reports proved to be more or less consistent: They started work in mid-February of 2005, after taking the back half of 2004 off. The songs that Yorke brought in excited the band. Ed especially felt moved by the new material, which was uniquely romantic, even sexy. (Yorke would later describe them as his “seduction songs.”) “It was the first time in a long while that I felt really engaged with the lyrics,” O’Brien told Mojo in 2008.
The idea right away was to make a lean record with ten or eleven songs, a reaction to the overstuffed Hail to the Thief. The tunes were simple and heartfelt, lending themselves to straightforward interpretations. There would seemingly be no need for the endless deliberations and mind games of 1999 and 2000… except Radiohead found themselves slipping back into their old habits.
The initial excitement that the band felt in February soon faded as they rehearsed endlessly over the next several months. In time, their fragile sense of self-confidence as a band was shattered. The old demon from the Kid A era eventually returned—they could sense that they worked best when they simply plugged in and worked through the songs live, and yet when they played back the songs they recorded that way, it sounded basic and obvious, even dull.
And then there was the momentum issue. They didn’t need to make an album, or do anything else as a band, at this point. With Kid A, Radiohead found that having an open-ended deadline and considerable resources to make whatever album they wanted—which, given that memories of the rushed sessions for Pablo Honey and The Bends were still fresh, was a genuine luxury—eventually worked against them. But at least they had the motivation of youth and the drive to prove all of the people who thought they could never top OK Computer wrong. With In Rainbows, the only motivation was whether they really wanted to do it again. And maintaining a legacy will never be as compelling as building one.
They didn’t even know what to actually do with this music, assuming they could ever get their act together and finish it off. They still didn’t have a record deal, and while they weren’t sure they even wanted one, they also didn’t know what to do as an alternative. “We were having endless debates, spending entire afternoons talking about, ‘Well, if we do something, how do we put it out?’” Yorke said later. “It just became this endless and pointless discussion. Because in our dreams, it would be really nice to just let off this enormous stink bomb in the industry.”
By October, Yorke was moved—as he often was during this period—to rant melodramatically on the Dead Air Space blog. “We’re splitting up,” he wrote. “It’s all shit. We’re washed up, finished.”
Of course, Radiohead wasn’t finished, nor was In Rainbows done with being a frustrating slog. Rather than use Nigel Godrich, who was busy helping Yorke with The Eraser along with working with Beck on The Information—an album that I, along with most people, have played exactly once—they had asked Mark “Spike” Stent in December ’05 to listen to what they had been working on. And Stent, whose résumé included records by U2, Björk, and Massive Attack, confirmed their worst fears, according to O’Brien, who recalled him flatly declaring, “The sounds aren’t good enough.”
So now Spike Stent was on board as a producer as Radiohead entered early 2006, a full year after they started working on their seventh album. With Stent, they laid down early versions of future In Rainbows tracks like “Bodysnatchers,” “Nude,” and “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.” But still, they were dissatisfied. “I’ve been fucking tearing my hair out,” Yorke fumed on the blog that March. Eventually, Stent would exit the project.
Radiohead was in serious trouble.
From the outside, little about the making of In Rainbows makes sense. Why was this, of all Radiohead albums, arguably the hardest for them to make? It wasn’t some radical sonic reinvention for the band. The songs themselves appear to have been in place well before they were officially laid down. It seems like Radiohead had a great record in their grasp for months, even years before In Rainbows was finally released. And yet… they couldn’t figure it out.
For the longest time I couldn’t fathom any of it. And then I remembered one of the core foundations of my personal philosophy on life, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money.
I would never call The Color of Money the best Scorsese movie. It’s not even the fifth best. Nor is it the best movie in which Paul Newman plays the hard-luck, streetwise pool player “Fast” Eddie Felson. (That would be 1961’s The Hustler.) But it is a movie I think about a lot, because Newman spouts so many quotable lines that I’ve come to take as valuable life advice. For instance, when Fast Eddie is teaching his headstrong young protégé Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise) about how to take a dive in a game in order to win more money in the long run, he says, “Sometimes when you lose, you win.”
Sometimes when you lose, you win. That’s about as close as you can get to summing up the meaning of life while also talking about how to scam suckers at billiards.
The Color of Money quote that pertains to Radiohead’s predicament at the time of In Rainbows occurs when Newman is trying to explain that Vincent has to be self-aware about his weaknesses and eccentricities, so that he can use them to his advantage when he’s hustling people. “He’s got to learn how to be himself,” Eddie says, “but on purpose.”
That had been Radiohead’s problem since the Kid A era. They didn’t know how to be themselves, but on purpose. On Kid A, they were deliberately trying to not be themselves. They changed how they worked, and they subtracted the elements of their music that were most recognizable and subsequently co-opted by a legion of copycats. Though when they got on the road they found the songs opened up in new and surprising ways when they played them like the same old Radiohead.
On Hail to the Thief, they overcorrected, working swiftly as a live unit without stopping to consider whether they really needed to put “The Gloaming” and “We Suck Young Blood” on the same record, or any record. For In Rainbows, they finally had to finish the process of self-discovery that began several years earlier with Kid A. “I suppose we were paying the price for not taking the pain on Hail to the Thief,” a reflective Colin Greenwood told Mojo in 2008. “As this project progressed, we realized there are no short cuts to the process being exciting for us.”
As is usually the case with Radiohead, the path toward a solution started by going back on the road in the summer of 2006, including a headlining appearance at Bonnaroo that would be remembered by fans and the band members themselves as an all-time gig. Six songs that ended up on In Rainbows were played that night: “15 Step,” “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” “Videotape,” “Nude,” “Bodysnatchers,” and “House of Cards,” with the latter two numbers showing up in each of the two encores. That’s basically the meat of the record, performed pretty much exactly as they would appear on In Rainbows. (I actually prefer the ominous live version of “Videotape” from Bonnaroo to the take on the album.)
The audience’s response to the new material is audibly enthusiastic; fans in many cases already knew the songs from other concerts bootlegged online, as they had during the early Kid A shows. Radiohead should have gone home from these shows feeling like they were ready to lay down a classic. But they were instead driven to tinker even more.
“To be brutally honest,” O’Brien later admitted, “the problem about playing these songs live is that we were bored with them. We played them 80 times live or so, and we’d rehearsed them to death. It just didn’t happen when we got back into the studio initially.”
This time, at least, they had Godrich back in the fold. Yorke had been lobbying to bring him back via his press interviews for The Eraser, while also hinting that his close relationship with Godrich—along with the suspicion that using him again was the “safe” choice—was a problem for the rest of the band. But by the fall of 2006, it was clear that Radiohead needed help from their old collaborator, who in turn suggested that they ship off to a condemned, possibly haunted mansion in the English countryside—“literally an old country pile,” as O’Brien put it—a gambit that had previously worked for the band on OK Computer and Kid A.
This practice of stealing away to some house outside of the hustle and bustle of civilization to create your masterpiece evokes the old myths about Bob Dylan and the Band knocking out The Basement Tapes at Big Pink in upstate New York. There’s also an element of the Rocky movies, in which the beleaguered champ goes into the mountains to haul boulders through the snow in order to get back into fighting shape.
For Radiohead, the fight to get out of one’s head remains the most enduring problem of their creative lives. And anything they could do to put themselves out of the mode of perpetual analyzation, and just be, was worth pursuing. For Yorke, in particular, this would prove key for In Rainbows. “The more you absorb yourself in the present tense, the more likely that what you write will be good,” he insisted upon the album’s release.
The pivotal track in that regard proved to be “Reckoner,” a snaky, rattling track with a ghostly, John Frusciante–inspired guitar lick and a gorgeous, soaring vocal by Yorke. The song was first performed live during the Amnesiac tour, at a concert in George, Washington, that subsequently became a popular bootleg among fans. Though this version of “Reckoner”—a violent, snarling rocker far heavier than anything on Kid A or Amnesiac—wound up being an entirely different song from the “Reckoner” that appeared on In Rainbows. (Yorke later released it as a solo single called “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses,” which is also an apt description of what it sounds like.)
After the 2006 tour, Radiohead decided to revive “Reckoner,” adding a new coda, and then another part. Finally, they discarded the original song altogether. For Yorke, this stood out as the band learning how to live in the moment. “It’s what sticks that I’m after and that happened a few times while making this,” Yorke said. “I try and do that thing where it’s sort of automatic, that whatever comes out comes out and try not to censor it too much.”
“Reckoner” is indicative of the overall shift that Radiohead’s music took with In Rainbows. Unlike the classic songs from the ’90s, or the attempts at reviving that sound on Hail to the Thief—“we were trying to do what people said we were good at,” Yorke later admitted to Mojo—the songs on In Rainbows rarely build to some dramatic climax. There are no crescendos in “Reckoner,” “House of Cards,” “Weird Fishes,” or “All I Need.” They appear, they move throughout the world, and then they fade out. They live out the same arc that human beings do, which is why they feel and sound so natural and organic. They aren’t telegraphing the moments where you’re supposed to feel a surge of adrenaline or an unstoppable compulsion to weep. There is enough space and air in this music to put whatever you want into it. While In Rainbows isn’t ambient music, it does have a similar atmospheric sensation, creating a sonic world that doesn’t intrude on that of the listener, but rather complements it, like a warm blanket or a bottle of red wine.
This wasn’t the Radiohead of Kid A, fighting with itself for months upon months in order to become something new and revolutionary. This was Radiohead being themselves, but on purpose.