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 through the band’s website and pay whatever they liked, including nothing. This album was Radiohead’s first release after they had no more contractual obligations with EMI, and made more money in total downloads than all their previous digital releases combined.
But how did this record even come to be? After the release of their last EMI album, Hail To The Thief, they took a few months off from recording. But when they got back in the studio, their ideas weren’t going anywhere, they had no producer, and no distributor. 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 a real possibility.
Yet when Nigel Godrich became available as a producer, he guided them towards making one of my favourite albums of all time. But that was only phase one. The band knew that they needed a new process in recording their songs, so 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 is designed by Stanley Donwood, who designed all of the band’s album covers (except Pablo Honey). It was made by splashing molten wax from syringes, and perfectly encapsulates the album’s focus on orchestral, lush, natural, spacious, disorienting atmospheres.
The lyrics are more tethered to the natural world too, departing from the usual themes of technology-enabled dystopia in favour of universally human topics: death, desire, unrequited love, insecurity, and feeling stuck. It goes from paranoia to sensuality, from anxiety to romance.
Yorke has said about the title that it’s his take on seduction songs, 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.”
Meanwhile, the songs are about “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’s 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.
“The lyrics are more tethered to the natural world too, departing from the usual themes of technology-enabled dystopia in favour of universally human topics.”
With an opener as strong and sonically demanding as 15 Step, you are introduced into the world of the album: fuzzy, experimental, and (if you want to get technical) their happiest song given its major key and 5/4 time signature. 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”. The song 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”). In Yorke’s own words it’s about “the feeling of your physical consciousness, trapped, without being able to connect with anything else”. 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 they reference how labels often want artists to polish themselves.
“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.”
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 with OK Computer. But in Godrich’s own words, “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 shorter introduction. The end result is one of the most beautiful instrumentals I’ve heard, with shimmering strings and reversed drum tracks. The rich introduction with sparse instrumentals, echoing layered vocals lift you up, only for the drum line to drop you back down. 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 the percussion.
All this is matched with the lyrics, which table dreams and their failure, and how that repetitive cycle stifles creativity. Eventually you think to yourself, “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”. But at the same time, it’s acceptance. 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 self-degradation at its purest form.
“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.”
In the album’s fourth track, Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi is Yorke takes a leap of faith. Here, at his weakest point, Yorke reaches for the chance of happiness (“I’d be crazy not to follow, follow where you lead”) and crawls our of rock 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.
This is then followed by the album’s fifth track, All I Need. A love song turned existential crisis (we’ve all been there). 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” simultaneously reassuring the listener and 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 is perhaps a caricature of the rest of the album. The stream-of-consciousness lyrics bring to mind not only the numbness of routine, but also a taxidermied human. “Dead from the neck up, I guess I’m stuffed”.
Reckoner took a while to grow on me. I used to think of it as somewhat boring, but I always changed my mind at 3 minutes and 19 seconds. The falsetto, the clanging instrumentals, the breakbeat, they all grew on me, and I now consider it one of their best songs. In fact, Reckoner was the working title of the album, and it’s understandable why: lyrics like “Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore” are about 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 instrumentals sound like walls moving and swimming around you, encapsulating the subject matter: remembering the band’s drunken nights at university. This song is perhaps the most anti-In Rainbows of the album, rejecting any need for 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”.
Next is the closer, Videotape. The syncopation snd 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 and understated track is a retrospective of a full lifetime and its fondest moments. Yorke sings of 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”. 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 here:
