Daydreaming

a jam without thom

It started with Jonny Greenwood at a piano during a jam that Yorke was not part of; Yorke put the vocal on in a separate session afterwards. They finished it early in the sessions at La Fabrique in 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, arranged by Greenwood, who had the cellists detune their instruments to get a growl out of them.

Nigel, Jonny and Thom all have this awesome relationship, and were so animated during the recording. 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, cellist · fact, 27 may 2016

twenty-three years

It ends in reversed vocals, which listeners have variously heard as “half of my life”, “I've found my love”, and “every minute, half of my love”. Critics connected the song to the end of Yorke's relationship with Rachel Owen after twenty-three years. Pitchfork noticed that twenty-three years was also roughly how long Radiohead had been releasing records, and read the song as “a reckoning with those years, and, in one way or another, an elegy to them”.

the video

Paul Thomas Anderson directed it, having worked with Greenwood on several of his films. Yorke walks through a chain of doors into unrelated places: 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 went out as a download on 6 May 2016, three days after “Burn the Witch”, the second single from A Moon Shaped Pool, and the band ran a competition for fans to make their own vignettes for it. Pitchfork named it among the best songs of the year.

the opener

First played in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, twenty-six times in 2017, and of the archive's 86 nights it has opened forty-eight, most recently Philadelphia on 1 August 2018.