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10:56 · 1,472 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The framing fact: six years after A Moon Shaped Pool is already the longest gap between Radiohead albums, beating the five years after The King of Limbs.
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- The record is largely made of reworked unreleased live songs, some dating as far back as 1995, rather than new writing.
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- The sessions ran while Thom Yorke was separating from Rachel Owen after 23 years and producer Nigel Godrich had just lost his father.
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- Several of the old songs were deliberately left unrecorded for years because the band wanted to wait until they could do them with a full orchestra.
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- Jonny Greenwood's classical side is the mechanism. He had written the string parts on earlier records and scored feature films, and with the London Contemporary Orchestra available he put strings and choral vocals at the front of the songwriting.
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- The same sessions produced Spectre, their rejected Bond theme.
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- Rachel Owen died of cancer eight months after the album came out, which the video notes retroactively deepens how the record reads.
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- On tour they opened concerts with a Nina Simone interview clip about freedom meaning no fear, which gives a third reading of the album's most ambiguous vocal, alongside the divorce and the span of the band's own career.
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- Burn the Witch was first worked on during the Kid A sessions in 2000, its title and artwork appear in Hail to the Thief materials, the words were finished around 2005, and Yorke kept saying they would do it when they got an orchestra.
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- True Love Waits took 21 years and four attempts to land, played live acoustically in 1995, tried at OK Computer, tried again at Kid A and Amnesiac where it turned into a different song entirely, and it arrives as the album's closer and the band's hundredth core-catalogue song.
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