Thom Yorke's “Daily Battles” is out, with Flea and Wynton Marsalis

Thom Yorke's “Daily Battles”, the song Edward Norton asked him to write for his film Motherless Brooklyn, is out today, together with an instrumental version by Wynton Marsalis. Both are on the soundtrack, and they are paired on a seven-inch single due on 4 October.

Norton has known Yorke since the mid-1990s, when Michael Stipe introduced them around Radiohead's support slots with R.E.M. Before filming began he emailed Yorke the script, he told Rolling Stone in July, asking for an old-world melancholy ballad with Yorke's voice standing in for that of Lionel, the detective with Tourette's whom Norton plays. Two weeks later an email arrived at 6am with the finished song, Yorke at the piano, singing. He sent me this track of him on a piano singing it and I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, crying from listening to this song⁷

Norton took to the phrase so much that he wrote “daily battles” into a scene, and the song runs through the film as its theme. Motherless Brooklyn premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and opens in cinemas on 1 November.

Yorke is the song's only writer, and his recording is built on his voice and piano. Flea, his bandmate in Atoms for Peace, plays bass and a lonely trumpet line. Yorke brought him in to tie his version to Marsalis's period jazz, then took some of Flea's lines, reversed them and ran them through compressors so that they play backward and forward at once.

Marsalis's arrangement came out of a jazz-club scene between Lionel and Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character, for which Norton wanted the song done as a 1957 Miles Davis ballad. Marsalis heard it, called it a really pretty tune and was back with his arrangement for a jazz group two days later. And the first time Thom heard it, he kind of put his head between his legs and said 'Jesus, fuck.'⁷