Amnesiac (album) - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

"I read that the gnostics believe when we are born we are forced to forget where we have come from in order to deal with the trauma of arriving in this life. I thought this was really fascinating. It's like the river of forgetfulness. may have been recorded at the same time ... but it comes from a different place I think. It sounds like finding an old chest in someone's attic with all these notes and maps and drawings and descriptions of going to a place you cannot remember."

—Songwriter Thom Yorke

Amnesiac's first track, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", is an electronic song built from compressed loops and vocals manipulated with pitch-correcting processor Auto-Tune to create a "nasal, depersonalised sound."

Yorke described the second track, single "Pyramid Song", as "me being totally obsessed by a Charlie Mingus song called 'Freedom' and I was just trying to duplicate that, really. Our first version of 'Pyramid' even had all the claps that you hear on 'Freedom'. Unfortunately, our claps sounded really naff, so I quickly erased them." The song's lyrics were inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while the band was recording in Copenhagen. He said: "Stephen Hawking talks about the theory that time is another force, that time is completely cyclical (...) It's something that I found in Buddhism as well. That's what 'Pyramid Song' is about, the fact that everything is going in circles." In 2001, O'Brien said he felt the track was "probably the best song we've recorded."

The third track, "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", was built on a Roland MC-505 sequencer with loops of found sounds recorded in the OK Computer sessions. Colin Greenwood explained: "We set up these tape recorders and we disabled the erase heads. We stuck the record head so it kept on recording over and over on top of itself and played keyboard notes into it to create this ghost repetition melody." Auto-Tune was used again, this time to process speech into melody: "You give the machine a key and then you just talk into it. It desperately tries to search for the music in your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music."

Yorke described the fourth track, "You and Whose Army?", as being "about someone who is elected into power by people and who then blatantly betrays them – just like Blair did." Attempting to capture the "soft, warm, proto-doowop sound" of the 1940s harmony group the Ink Spots, the band muffled microphones with eggboxes and used the ondes Martenot's resonating palme diffuseur loudspeaker to treat the vocals.

MOJO magazine described the fifth track, "I Might Be Wrong", as a "venomous guitar riff" over a "trance-like metallic beat"; Colin Greenwood's bassline was inspired by Chic bassist Bernard Edwards. The lyric "never look back" came from advice given to Yorke by his partner: "Be proud of what you've done. Don't look back and just carry on like nothing's happened. Just let the bad stuff go."

According to a studio diary kept by O'Brien, the sixth track, single "Knives Out", took 373 days to record, "a ridiculously long gestation period for any song." It was influenced by the guitar work of Johnny Marr of the Smiths, who described O'Brien showing the song to him before Amnesiac was released: "He explained to me that with that song they’d tried to take a snapshot of the way I’d done things in the Smiths – and I guess you can hear that in it."

The seventh track, "Morning Bell/Amnesiac", is an alternative version of "Morning Bell" from Kid A. O'Brien explained: "We often record different versions of songs and the new one is the first time it has been strong enough to bear hearing again. Most of the other versions often get scrapped halfway through." On Radiohead's official website, Yorke wrote that "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" was included "because it came from such a different place from the other version. Because we only found it again by accident after having forgotten about it. Because it sounds like a recurring dream. It felt right."

The eighth track, "Dollars and Cents", was edited down from an eleven-minute jam inspired by krautrock band Can: "That Holger thing of chop-chop-chop, making what seems like drivel into something coherent." Colin Greenwood played an Alice Coltrane record over the recording, inspiring his brother Jonny to write a "Coltrane-style" string arrangement. Yorke said: "The lyrics are gibberish but they come out of ideas I've been fighting with for ages about how people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive, but we're powerless because we can't name it."

The ninth track, "Hunting Bears", is a short instrumental on electric guitar and synthesiser.

The tenth track, "Like Spinning Plates", was constructed from components of another song, "I Will", which the band had tried to record in the same sessions. Unsatisfied with the results, which Yorke described as "dodgy Kraftwerk", the band reversed the recording and used it to create a new track. Yorke said: "We'd turned the tape around, and I was in another room, heard the vocal melody coming backwards, and thought, 'That's miles better than the right way round', then spent the rest of the night trying to learn the melody." Yorke was recorded singing the melody backwards; this recording was in turn reversed to create "backwards-sounding" vocals. "I Will" was later released in a different arrangement on Radiohead's sixth album, Hail to the Thief.

Amnesiac's eleventh and final track, "Life in a Glasshouse", features jazz band the Humphrey Lyttelton Band. After listening to a demo of the song, trumpeter and bandleader Humphrey Lyttelton suggested arranging it in the style of a New Orleans jazz funeral. He described the song as starting "with me doing a sort of ad-libbed, bluesy, minor key meandering, then it gradually gets so that we're sort of playing real wild, primitive, New Orleans blues stuff." According to Lyttelton, Radiohead "didn't want it to sound like a slick studio production but a slightly exploratory thing of people playing as if they didn't have it all planned out in advance." Yorke said the lyrics "she is papering the window panes / she is putting on a smile" were inspired by "this interview with the wife of a very famous actor who the tabloids completely hounded for three months like dogs from hell. She got the copies of the papers with her picture and she posted them up all over the house, over all the windows so that all the cameras that were outside on her lawn only had their own images to photograph. I thought that was brilliant, and that's where the song started from."