“True Love Waits” is on record at last, rebuilt on two pianos

“True Love Waits” closes A Moon Shaped Pool, out as a download since Sunday, and it is the first studio recording of the song ever released.

Radiohead first played it on 5 December 1995 at the Luna Theater in Brussels, Thom Yorke singing over a strummed guitar. It stayed unreleased for years and travelled among fans on bootlegs, and the band played it on only 19 nights before this year, 18 of them between 2000 and 2009, mostly with Yorke alone on acoustic guitar. Matthew Dessem, writing in Slate, sets setlist.fm's count of 20 performances against 407 for “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” and 16 for their cover of the Bond theme “Nobody Does It Better”.

Until now its one official release was Yorke's solo acoustic performance recorded in Oslo, the last track on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings, the 2001 live album from the Kid A and Amnesiac tours. Nigel Godrich, the band's producer, told Rolling Stone in 2012 that they had tried to record the song more times than he could count, and he called the Oslo take that shitty live version¹. We could do “True Love Waits” and make it sound like John Mayer. Nobody wants to do that.³

Pitchfork named the new recording Best New Track on Monday, and its reviewer, Jill Mapes, puts it in a line of bare closing songs with Kid A's “Motion Picture Soundtrack” and In Rainbows' “Videotape”. Patrick D. McDermott of The FADER rates it highly but expects fans of the old version to argue over which is better.

The new version has no guitar. Two pianos carry it, one playing sparse three-note arpeggios with the sustain pedal down, the other mixed low and circling the melody, and it moves more slowly than the Oslo take.