Thom Yorke is guest DJ on NPR's All Songs Considered

Thom Yorke is guest DJ on All Songs Considered, Bob Boilen's music programme on NPR, playing records by Liars, Modeselektor, Madvillain and Autechre and talking about In Rainbows and The Eraser in between. Asked whether it matters that listeners miss his words, he says musicians are always surprised when a song isn't obvious to other people, and offers “Everything In Its Right Place” as the classic case. Well, it has an extra beat in it, which I didn't even realize. And Jonny's like, it doesn't cycle normally. It doesn't cycle right.¹ On “Videotape” he did the same thing, putting the one two beats earlier than it should be.

Of “Reckoner” he says I'm singing those words because I have to sing those words.¹ Worrying afterwards about what a lyric means is a bad habit, and it drains a song of the energy it started with. The line in “Nude” about painting yourself white was the first thing he wrote for the song, and he spent a very long time trying to swap it for something better, because on paper it looks absurd.

Diplo is working on a remix of “Nude”, which Boilen calls the album's waltz, and has emailed Yorke that the main thing is to keep it in 6/8. The music on the In Rainbows CD is the same as the download, Yorke says, but the MP3s were compressed a little. we didn't want it to take ages to download and stuff, not least of which because it would have blown our server apart.¹

His first pick is Drum's Not Dead, the record Liars made after they moved to Berlin, which he has played endlessly in the car without working out what it is about, to his family's puzzlement. He is still unhealthily obsessed by the two German guys¹ in Modeselektor, and plays “Kill Bill Vol. 4”, their most full-on club track, which opens on people talking in the toilets. Their remix of his “Skip Divided”, built from parts he sent them, is one of the Eraser remixes XL put out as downloads in December, and they are now being pressed on vinyl. He calls Madvillain, MF Doom rapping over Madlib's beats, the most inspiring wordsmith around. His friend the Oxford poet Jamie McKendrick, who usually has little time for lyrics, likened Doom to Bob Dylan with no folk in it.

The Eraser was made almost entirely inside a laptop while he travelled, from fragments pieced together at night when he couldn't sleep, and he has been working on new things the same way. With a new set of touch-screen controllers, which he calls Lemurs, the rest of the band and Nigel Godrich can now join in computer work that used to be one man clicking a mouse, he says. Godrich's great gift is speed, Yorke says, and of the band he himself is the worst for getting lost in cutting and chopping. The programme ends on Autechre's LP5, which Yorke and Boilen skip through before he picks “Vose In”. Asked how to say the titles, he suggests Autechre type them with their elbows.

Played on the programme