True Love Waits by Radiohead

Album: I Might Be Wrong - Live Recordings (2001)

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Songfacts®:

This song shows that everyone in life will eventually find love, we just have to wait.
Thom Yorke got the lyric, "True love lives on lollipops and crisps" from a newspaper article he was reading. The story was about a 10 year old boy who was left home alone for 2 days, and the boy lived on lollipops and crisps (potato chips). True love can be anything.
The song dates back to the mid-1990s and has been a popular concert ballad since then; a live version was released on the 2001 live album I Might Be Wrong.

Longtime co-producer Nigel Godrich told Rolling Stone in 2012: "We tried to record it countless times, but it never worked. The irony is you have that sh---y live version. To Thom's credit, he needs to feel a song has validation, that it has a reason to exist as a recording. We could do 'True Love Waits' and make it sound like John Mayer. Nobody wants to do that."

A studio version was eventually recorded for the 2016 LP A Moon Shaped Pool.
This is the closing track of A Moon Shaped Pool. The opening track starts with the word "stay" and this song ends with the words "don't leave." Could that be a response from the band to the rumors that Moon Shaped Pool was going to be the last Radiohead album?
This was revealed to be Radiohead's saddest song according to research collected in 2016 by a prominent data scientist.

Comments: 5

MedusaI was thinking there must be some connection to the Buddy Holly song True Love Ways.
Truelovewaits from Cambridge I know what Thom Yorke said about the Lollipops line… but I think this news article is much more likely to be the real source of inspiration:

https://bit.ly/30VBQQB

It’s about a boy whose mother dies, and he survives on lollipops and crisps until she is discovered and he is saved. He is convinced she is just sleeping until people arrive to lead him away. This fits the themes of the song, and the article was published at about the right time…
Oldpink from Farmland, InMagnificent lyrics, and Yorke's vocals perfectly convey them.
Bernard from Auckland, New ZealandA small correction, the release dat for this song was in the year 2003 in June
Bernard from Auckland, New Zealandthis is such a nice song,

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