In 1995, a story about a ten-year-old British boy who was accidentally left home alone by his parents for a week made the news because the boy survived his temporary abandonment by eating potato chips and lollipops. Struck by the incidental poeticism of this story, Thom Yorke incorporated it into one of the verses of a simple guitar ballad called “True Love Waits:”
And true love waits in haunted attics
And true love lives on lollipops and crisps
The gentle, human tenderness of this imagery sets “True Love Waits” apart lyrically from many Radiohead songs, whose constructed artificiality (for example, Yorke wrote most of the lyrics on Kid A by cutting up phrases and rearranging the words) makes them just as overwhelming and paranoia-inducing as the world that inspired them. There is none of that opacity here. And unlike the way similarly yearning guitar anthems from the same era, like “Fake Plastic Trees” and “High and Dry,” build up to near-yelling final verses, the 1995 version of “True Love Waits” comes out of the gate in its full intensity, Yorke singing from his chest a declaration of devotion, “I’ll drown my beliefs / To have you be in peace,” over a guitar on which he strums the same six chords over and over, gaining in intensity as he goes on. A begging refrain, “Just don’t leave / Don’t leave,” hangs at the end of each verse, Yorke belting it twice at the end of the song, devotion giving way to entreaty, too earnest to be humiliating.
Because of the singularity of “True Love Waits,” Radiohead and their longtime producer Nigel Godrich struggled for years to record it, attempting to make it work for OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac, but ultimately failing to find the right arrangement. A live recording of it closes their 2001 EP I Might Be Wrong, stuck on at the end, not quite fitting but getting away with it thanks to the album’s inherent disjointedness, created by its assemblage of live performances from different shows.
“True Love Waits” was my first favorite Radiohead song. I would listen to it by watching live performances on YouTube and found some pleasure in the fact that this song was sort of a misfit, repeatedly slipping through the grip and precision of the studio; that no matter how hard anyone tried, they just couldn’t find an arrangement that made it make sense.
I also took pleasure in showing people this song — not to show off my knowledge of live Radiohead performances on YouTube, which at this point borders on the embarrassing — but because it’s so unlike any other Radiohead song that it confounds and delights everyone on first listen.
In May of 2016, Radiohead released A Moon Shaped Pool, their first album in five years. Pool is a honed-in, haunting record, especially compared to its electronically erratic predecessor, The King of Limbs. Throughout, Yorke’s subdued, almost anemic vocals pair with expansive, sparkling instrumental arrangements that resemble the more experimental work he and guitarist Jonny Greenwood have recently done in solo records and film scores. Pool is a further crystallization of Radiohead’s ability to craft songs marked both by overwhelming complexity and obsessive precision.
So, it was surprising to find, at the end of an album that evidences such clear forward motion in the evolution of a band that have never stopped pushing their own limits (imagine writing “Paranoid Android,” not to mention the whole of OK Computer, then continuing to take the gamble that you might write something better, and winning that bet), a 21-year-old song called “True Love Waits.”
Since Pool came out, I have been in a protracted argument with my friend Kyle about “True Love Waits.” He thinks putting it at the end of Pool might be the worst thing Radiohead have ever done. I think it might be the best.
In the Pool version of “True Love Waits,” a minimal, twinkling piano accompanies Yorke’s vocals instead of that relentless 90s acoustic guitar. He’s not singing from the chest anymore — it’s all head voice — and he sounds less insistent, more resigned, like he knows he might be doomed to sing these words forever. Maybe no one will ever answer his pleas. In certain moments, the song stretches out, spacious, reverberant, creating so much room around Yorke’s voice that despite all the intensely intimate heartache in his pleading, it feels like he might actually be singing to no one at all. It feels slower, less forceful, like a stain of the original version — not something new and refreshed, but something old that’s been put through its paces.
After all the years of searching for a place for it, all the years of trying to make it fit, putting “True Love Waits” at the end of Pool stands as a testament to the faith that its declaration — true love waits — actually belongs anywhere. And it’s a daring unveiling of the delicate center of Radiohead’s music. Underneath all the technical precision; all the terrifying enormity of crunchy and droning guitars; all the perfect, gliding synths; all the wide-eyed paranoia and bile; beneath the caging horrors and blinding rage; beneath Radiohead’s electronic grandiosity, lies a fragile, wanting heart, pleading less to a lover than to love itself: don’t leave.
P.S. I compiled every distinct version of “True Love Waits” I could find on YouTube into a playlist organized by chronological order of performance. If you’re curious, it’s here.
This is the third part of a three-part series on Radiohead. You can read the first and second parts at the links below: