Daydreaming

a jam without thom

It started with Jonny Greenwood at a piano, during a jam Thom Yorke was not part of, and Yorke put the vocal on afterwards in a session of his own. It came together early in the sessions at La Fabrique, in the south of France, and Yorke called it the breakthrough of the album. The warped introduction is the tape slowed down.

The strings were recorded at RAK in London by the London Contemporary Orchestra under Hugh Brunt, from Greenwood's arrangement, and Oliver Coates was among the cellists. For the ending Jonny had the cellos tune their bottom strings down about a fifth and play on regardless, so that, he told the BBC, you hear them struggling to stay in tune, with a low growl underneath.

I remember we were laying down the cello part at the end of ‘Daydreaming’ and Thom said, ‘That's it, that is the sound of the record.’

oliver coates · fact, 27 may 2016

through the doors

Paul Thomas Anderson, who had worked with Greenwood on several of his films, directed the video. Yorke walks through a run of doors into places that have nothing to do with each other, a hotel, a hospital, a laundry, a convenience store, a car park. At the end he climbs a snowy hill, goes into a cave, lies down by a fire and mouths the last words.

It came out as a download on 6 May 2016, three days after “Burn the Witch”, and that summer the band handed fans a loop of the song and asked them to film their own vignettes to it, the winner to close the series on the band's website.

a festival goes quiet

Through 2016 it came second every night, straight after “Burn the Witch”. At NOS Alive outside Lisbon, on 8 July 2016, a festival crowd simply stopped talking while it played, and Jamie Milton, there for DIY, wrote that you would be hard pressed to find a festival crowd more observant for the band's softer moments.

From Miami on 30 March 2017 it took the first slot for itself and held it, bar a couple of nights, to the end of the 2018 tour, opening 48 shows. When it came back in 2025 it sat in the middle of the set, and on the third of four nights at the Uber Arena in Berlin on 11 December Phil Selway left his drum kit for it to play two keyboards set facing each other, one of which, Sassan Niasseri noticed for Rolling Stone in Germany, nobody else touched all night.

twenty-three years

Reviewers tied the song to the end of Yorke's relationship with Rachel Owen, after 23 years. Pitchfork pointed out that 23 years was also roughly how long Radiohead had been putting out records, and read it as an elegy for those years too. It ends in reversed vocals, which listeners have heard as “half of my life”, as “I've found my love” and as “every minute, half of my love”.