3 of Thom Yorke’s Most Emotionally Raw Lyrics

Thom Yorke is musically difficult to pin down. You can call Radiohead a rock band, which they are, but Yorke has gone to great lengths to shun any expectations surrounding his band or his work beyond it. But even in Yorke’s biggest hit, “Creep”, there’s an emotional rawness and vulnerability that has remained consistent through his career. For this list, I hope to highlight three of his most emotional lyrics from Radiohead songs that casual fans may not know.

“Videotape”

After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, the writer Christopher Hitchens was asked how he was feeling. He said, “I’m dying. But so are you.” In “Videotape”, Thom Yorke writes from the perspective of a dying man. He records his thoughts as a resigned farewell to loved ones. It shows how we strive for immortality in what we leave behind—an attempt to claw back our mere existence. And Yorke’s choice of an outdated medium highlights the ephemerality of it all.

This is my way of saying goodbye,
Because I can’t do it face to face.
So I’m talking to you before…

“Pyramid Song”

Yorke’s piano chords fall in uneven rhythms. They feel random, yet tied together at the same time. It echoes the abstraction in the lyrics, which gives one the sense of a deeply personal moment within the unfathomable bigness of space and time. He sings about lovers, his past and futures, and the comforting thought of an afterlife: “We all went to heaven in a little row boat.” This is a zoomed-out gaze on little humans trying to both understand and grapple with impermanence.

There was nothing to fear,
Nothing to doubt.

“The Numbers”

Another one about mortality. But here, Yorke writes about humans’ epic capacity to destroy ourselves and the planet we inhabit. “We are of the earth, to her we do return / The future is inside us / It’s not somewhere else,” he sings. Meanwhile, Radiohead evolved and reimagined the limits of a rock band by deconstructing the concept entirely. But beneath all the glitching experiments lay Yorke’s timeless folk songs.

We call upon the people,
People have this power.
The numbers don’t decide.
Your system is a lie.

Photo by Naomi Rahim/WireImage