Dissecting Radiohead's In Rainbows
An unnecessarily deep dive into Radiohead's 2007 masterpiece.
In Rainbows cover art by Stanley Donwood.
In 2007, Radiohead released their album In Rainbows 10 days after its announcement. In what Thom Yorke described as the “most exciting week of (his) life”, the album was released with a pay-what-you-want method, meaning fans could download the album online through the band’s website and pay whatever they liked, including nothing. This album was Radiohead’s first release after they had finished their contractual obligations with EMI, made an instantaneous $3 million, and made more money in total downloads than all their previous digital releases combined.
Because the band was now free from their obligations with EMI, they decided to take a few months off and not record. Yet when they got back in the studio, their ideas weren’t going anywhere, they had no producer, and no distributor given their newfound lack of association with a label. On top of this, Thom Yorke had grown bored of Radiohead and began to record his own solo material to re-energise his creativity. The end of Radiohead was not off the table, and the band considered breaking up due to this lack of inspiration, direction, distributor, and producer.
Yet when Nigel Godrich became available as a producer, he guided them towards making one of my favourite albums of all time. After realising they needed new processes to record songs, they toured in 2006 with half-finished tracks and tried them out in front of crowds. This released the pressure of being in the studio and let the band reconnect with their audience. After this process, they returned to the studio refreshed, having hit a mental reset and with their creativity flowing. They recorded 16 tracks originally, with Godrich’s help to strip them back to their core. Eventually they cut it down to the 10 songs that make up In Rainbows.
The album’s cover art was designed by Stanley Donwood, who designed all of the band’s album covers with the exception of Pablo Honey. This vivid and naturalistic cover was painted by using syringes filled with molten wax and represents the band’s evolution while maintaining its essence. It visually shows the themes of the album: the heavy focus on atmosphere; the orchestral, lush, natural yet slightly distorted instrumentals with shimmering strings, synths, and an Ondes Martenot. The lyrics deal with existential yet inherently human topic such as death, desire, unrequited love, insecurity, the feeling of being stuck. It stands out from their other albums not only in their more accessible instrumentation, but in switching their themes of technology and dystopia for themes about the human experience. It goes from paranoia to sensuality, from anxiety to romance.
When discussing the title of the album, Yorke has said claimed that it’s his take on seduction songs, a series of portraits of lust and human desires that drive and control our actions. “That’s why it’s called ‘In Rainbows.’ That obsession thing, thinking beyond where you are at the time. It’s a phrase I had for a while, it kept coming up in my notebooks. And I don’t know why, because it’s kind of naff. But it seemed to work – it’s one of those weird things. It stuck and I don’t know why.”. In his words, the songs relate to “the fucking panic of realising you’re about to die. And that anytime soon, I could possibly have a heart attack when I next go for a run. (…) That anonymous fear thing, the feeling of sitting in traffic thinking, ‘I’m sure I’m meant to be doing something else’”. It is the desire to get somewhere you’re not. It’s about the discomfort that you can’t quite place, pointing to the human experience. This inability to understand your own emotions, the discrepancy between what you know and what you feel.
“It stands out from their other albums not only in their more accessible instrumentation, but it switches their themes of technology and dystopia for themes about the human experience.”
With an opener as strong and sonically demanding as 15 Step, you are introduced into the world of the album: fuzzy, experimental, and instrumentally the happiest Radiohead song given its major key and 5/4 time signature. This time signature makes it impossible for the listener to move slower than the beat itself and thus forces the listener to embrace the song’s feeling and tempo. Yet the lyrics deal with the cycle of disappointment. It refers to death, with the number 15 frequently used by Yorke as a code for this (see also: Climbing Up The Walls and Just). 15 steps are the the approximate height of a long-drop gallows, bringing a new meaning to lines such as “cut the string” and “15 steps, then a sheer drop”. Here, death is alluded to as a release: “one by one, comes to us all, it’s as soft as your pillow”. Although somewhat gut-wrenching in its subject matter, 15 Step sets the stage for the album’s themes of repetition, agony, death, and desire.
Bodysnatchers discusses the all-too-familiar the themes of imposter syndrome (“I’ve no idea what I am talking about”) and identity issues (“You got a skin and you put me in”, “I’m a lie”). Bodysnatchers are fictional creatures that take a human’s body as a host, inserting their consciousness into it. In Yorke’s own words it’s about “the feeling of your physical consciousness, trapped, without being able to connect with anything else” (lines such as “blink your eyes, one for yes, two for no” bring to mind locked-in syndrome). Being one of the first songs the band recorded for the album, it makes sense that they also call out the music industry with lyrics like “You killed the sound, remove backbone, pale imitation with the edges sawn off”. Their post-EMI rebellion was still fresh, so here they reference how labels often want artists to normalise themselves, taking on a fake persona. When there is nothing that makes someone stand out, they adopt the quality of others (“Your mouth moves only with someone’s hand up your ass”).
“That’s why it’s called ‘In Rainbows.’ That obsession thing, thinking beyond where you are at the time.”
Yet what follows this anger and rebellion is one of my favourite songs of all time. Nude. With the working title Failure to Receive Payment Will Put Your House at Risk, the song took a decade to finish and was meant to be released in 1997 with OK Computer. According to Godrich, “songs have a kind of window where they are really most alive – and you have to capture it. Nude missed its window, and it took a lot of reinvention to bring it back to the place where we could capture it again in a way that resonated for the people playing it. It was essentially the same song; nothing had really changed. What has changed are the people playing it.” Yorke confirms this, saying “Ten years ago, when we first had the song, I didn’t enjoy singing it because it was 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”.
The original version used a faster tempo and a synth, with a less fleshed out introduction. The end result is one of the most beautiful instrumentals I’ve heard, with strings that drown you in, and reversed drum tracks. The rich introduction with sparse instrumentals, echo-y layered vocals lift you up, only for the drum line to drop you back down to Earth. It sounds like when you dream you’re falling and wake up to find you’re actually still in the comfort of your bed. The minimalistic bass-line plays only two notes (specifically G#/Ab one octave apart, then an E for a very brief second). The song is brimming with space and atmosphere, from the reverberated vocals to the simplistic guitar licks, with Jonny Greenwood’s dead notes on his guitar adding to this percussive theme to the song.
Lyrically, Nude deals with topics of dreams and failure, growing up, and a world in which everyone shares the same idea. Any hint of creativity is shut down: “Don’t get any big ideas, they’re not gonna happen”. Through this, we erase ourselves to try and run from this emptiness: “You paint yourself white and fill up with noise, but there’ll be something missing”. It’s about knowing that some dreams won’t come true, and eventually giving up on dreaming entirely: “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking”. Creativity is punished. It’s one of Radiohead’s most vulnerable songs, reflecting the self-doubt when doubting yourself, your potential. It’s self-degradation at its purest form.
In the album’s fourth track, Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi is Yorke takes a leap of faith. Here, at his weakest point, Yorke follows anything that offers him the chance of happiness (“I’d be crazy not to follow, follow where you lead”) and digs himself out of this bottom (“Everybody leaves if they get the chance, and this is my chance”, “I hit the bottom and escape”). The interlacing ascending and descending arpeggios creates a wall of sound that lure the listener in. This with the reverb vocals, the occasional elusive chime throughout, the drum loop; it sounds like looking up from underwater to see rays of sunlight.
“It’s about the discomfort that you can’t quite place, pointing to the human experience. This inability to understand your own emotions, the discrepancy between what you know and what you feel.”
This is then followed by the album’s fifth track, All I Need. A love song turned existential crisis. It’s about being unable reach or escape his beloved, despite their neglect (“I’m an animal trapped in your hot car”; “I am all the days you choose to ignore”). He degrades himself, his mental state steadily declining in his pursuit, which is once again presented sonically with the the sustained ambient guitar, the crunchy distortion creating a purgatory of sorts. All of this builds up until the cathartic outro, in which Yorke repeatedly belts out “It’s all wrong, it’s alright” as if trying to convince himself.
Next, Faust Arp is almost a palette-cleanser. The song takes its name partially from the 1500s myth of Johann Faust, a German alchemist and magician who sold his soul to the Mephistopheles in exchange for unlimited power and happiness. Yet Faust only realises happiness in his last moments on his deathbed, after travelling the world of politics, classical gods, and taming very the forces of war and nature. Faust Arp discusses being unfulfilled, stuck in monotony. It’s a perhaps a caricature of the rest of the album, of emotions that Yorke would normally not express. He sings his stream-of-consciousness lyrics alongside a wave of strings and Jonny Greenwood’s folk-like strumming. Lyrics such as “dead from the neck up” and “I guess I’m stuffed” bring to mind not only someone painfully bored of their repetitive life, but also a taxidermied human. Someone truly dead inside yet with the appearance of being alive.
Reckoner took a while to grow on me. I used to think of it as somewhat boring, but the 3:19 mark would always change my mind. The ever-present layered and falsetto vocals, the shimmering and clanging instrumentals, the breakbeat, the subtle strumming of the guitar so softly in the background, it all works together stunningly. Reckoner was the working title of the album, and in the song we can just barely hear Yorke singing the words “in rainbows” (“Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore (In rainbows)”). These words refer to the inevitability of death, and how all humans are simultaneously together and separated. Ripples on a shore are individual and yet still part of the ocean at large, which continues to exist when each ripple is gone. Despite it having very few words, this is one of the more lyrically dense songs of the album as it speaks of death as a whole in a peaceful way. One’s day of reckoning is an inevitable part of the human experience, perhaps why Yorke chose to sing the words “dedicated to all human beings”. Until this day of reckoning comes, humans fill our time with “bittersweet distractors”.
“Faust only realises happiness in his last moments on his deathbed, after travelling the world of politics, classical gods, and taming very the forces of war and nature.”
One of these distractors is love, about which Yorke sings in House of Cards. This more stripped down and minimalistic song is about Yorke’s desire to be with another woman and telling her this, not through metaphors or symbolism like in All I Need, but in a much more straightforward manner: “I don’t wanna be your friend, I just wanna be your lover. No matter how it ends, no matter how it starts”. The song brings back the familiar guitar tone and ambient soundscapes, offering somewhat of a breather in the album before the next track.
Jigsaw Falling Into Place is another one of my favourites from this album and of Radiohead’s entire catalogue. The way the instrumentals once again so accurately create what Yorke sings about, sounding like shifting walls during a drunken night. It fits with the song’s topic of remembering the drunken nights that the band had in their time at university. This song is perhaps the most anti-In Rainbows of the album, actively rejecting any need for words and analyses, presenting little deeper meaning, and not being about any existential crisis or dread of any sort. It’s merely about release and remembering the band’s good times: “Come on and let it out, before you run away from me, before you’re lost between the notes, just as you take the mic, just as you dance, dance, dance”; “there is nothing to explain”. The chaotic and fast strumming reflects this, creating its own world for 4 minutes and 8 seconds.
Next is the closer, Videotape. Its use of syncopation (meaning when the accent notes are those outside of the beat) and 154.78bpm makes it one of the most complicated songs for the band to play. The start of the song is shifted an eighth note ahead, breaking up the rhythmic monotony and causing listeners (and the band) to have to fight against our own brain waves. As of 2008, this was Yorke’s favourite thing that Radiohead had created “because it has this inexpressible substance thing going on behind the specifics of the song. So I’m really, really proud of that.” This delicately complex yet understated track is a retrospective of a full lifetime and its fondest moments. Yorke sings about the day he dies and how his life will be presented to him on videotape. How his “good old days” will be all there “in red, blue, green”. He calls back to Faust, stating that “Mephistopheles is just beneath, and he’s reaching up to grab me”, but he can’t quite reach. It honours and thanks the listener for being Yorke’s “centre when (he spins) away”. It’s about observing one’s life before arriving at the eternal bliss of the pearly gates of which Yorke sings in the opening line. The song’s climax once again shows the band’s ability to sonically portray the words being sung: the drums and repetition of the same piano chords and words bring to mind a videotape stuck in a loop. Yet the closing lines show Yorke’s peaceful view on death: “No matter what happens now, I shouldn’t be afraid, because today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen”.
“An album about the deepest and most essential aspects of the human experience.”
When discussing the song, Yorke said: “We would have these days where there were big breakthroughs and then suddenly… no. ‘Videotape’ to me was a big breakthrough, we tried everything with it. One day I came in and decided it was going to be like a fast pulse-like a four to the floor thing and everything was going to be built from that. We threw all this stuff at it. But then a couple of months later I went out and came back and Jonny and Nigel Godrich had stripped it back. He had this bare bones thing, which was amazing.”. This song truly is the most fitting close to such an inherently human album. An album about the deepest and most essential aspects of the human experience, not shying away from trying to understand the pain of this experience yet knowing that the end will be filled with peace and relief.
For more details about In Rainbows, listen to my episode of the My Mum Had a Mullet radio show about the topic here:
