open your ears

I want to start this blog with a mind-blowingly beautiful song. I believe that this one is no secret to any music-loving person. The last track of Radiohead’s Kid A album is perhaps the saddest closing track you could possibly think of and yet it is the perfect way to end this amazing record.

Right from the beginning the haunting harmonium takes you into this beautiful melancholic environment. What always fascinated me in this section is this one note that always stays on top of the others, kind of like a pedal point, which is the classical music term describing just that.

The first time you stop hearing that note is in the middle of the first verse at 00:49. This note is crucial for all the dissonances and chord progressions in the intro section.

What makes this song so melancholic are all those suspended chords that really linger with their resolvement. It’s just perfectly written and played with so much emotion.

In the back of this beautiful recording you can hear the pounding of Thom’s feet on the Harmonium pedals, pushing air into the instrument – making the instrument breath. At 00:40 you hear his voice enter as if he’s just trying to sing you to sleep…well…if it weren’t for the lyrics, it could effortlessly be a lullaby.

Of course you can write a whole article about the lyrics themselves, but I’m no lyricist and I wouldn’t do this song enough justice. And I think it is important that everyone has their own opinion on what the singer is saying and what to make of it.

But you gotta love that line at 01:15: “I think you’re crazy, maybe.”

On the one side this is such a huge thing to sing in a chorus because it reaches into your heart and you just know what he means by saying those things, but on the other hand it’s so subtle and introversive. Thom seems so insecure when singing this line.

01:38 Enter: Harps. This part is just so out of this world. No one could think of this when recording an album. That’s just Radiohead experimenting and trying out stuff in the studio. But it fits just perfectly. In the end, everything is so graceful: the harmonium, the angel choir, the harp…it all fits together. It all makes sense.

The idea for this song came around the time of Radiohead’s first record in 1993 (and it wasn’t released until the year 2000!). And you can hear that. Kid A is such a massive electronic album and so heavily built around perfection and the digital world, but when you listen to Motion Picture Soundtrack, you feel like you’re on another planet. It’s so personal and intimate. The first part of this song makes you feel as if you were sitting in the same room as Thom and he’s just singing those lines for you, but in the second part you get transported into heaven by this harp-playing angel called Jonny.

As an epilogue I would like to include a snippet from an interview where bassist Colin Greenwood talks about this song:

Colin: “I like ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ ’cause this journalist said it’s like the Wizard of Oz, it’s at the end of this mad record with all these mad sounds – Steve Lamacq from Radio 1, he said you get the curtains pulled back and there’s this bloke like pumping, you can hear the wheezing, grinding of this guy pedaling, playing the keyboard. It’s a harmonium from West Virginia from like the 1850’s that is actually on our first album, Pablo Honey, on a track called ‘Thinking About You’, and the studio closed down, and the guy wanted to sell us the equipment, which is sort of like a passing on of this stuff, so I love the idea that it’s on our fourth and first record, and also like the Wizard of Oz, and you see after all the technology and the Protools and the samplers…“

If you haven’t listened to this song yet, give it a try! I assure you: it is worth it.