Glass Eyes

a piano through max

It is the shortest thing on A Moon Shaped Pool, 2:52 on the release. Jonny Greenwood ran the piano through Max, the music programming language, and bent it there. He explained that to Bob Boilen on NPR's All Songs +1 in August 2016, in the conversation where he called string sessions the days he lives for, an orchestra booked for four hours and the parts waiting on empty stands in the morning.

The strings are the London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt and playing Greenwood's arrangement at RAK Studios in London. A month after the release Brunt was asked for his favourite moment on the record, chose this one, and gave the credit to the engineering of Nigel Godrich and Sam Petts-Davies.

an amazing fluid, fully dimensional quality in the sound

hugh brunt · howl & echoes, 3 june 2016

off the train

The song opens partway through a phone call. The singer has just got off a train somewhere frightening, where every face is concrete grey, and is wondering whether to turn round and buy another ticket while the panic builds. Then a path runs off down a mountain through dry scrub, and he no longer minds where it goes. The last lines feel a love going cold. The NPR interview and the novelist Adam Thorpe, who spent time with the band at La Fabrique, the studio in an old mill outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where they recorded, for the Times Literary Supplement, both described the words as an unguarded phone call.

It got two of the short films the band posted on Instagram that summer, the first of the series, by Tarik Barri, and a second by Weirdcore.

a wrong key

It was the last song from the album to reach the stage, tenth in the set at the Roundhouse in London on 27 May 2016, the second of three nights there, and Thomas Hannan, in the room for The Line of Best Fit, called it a melancholy delight. It was tenth in the set again in the Roman theatre at Fourvière in Lyon five days later, and then came back once, in the encore at the Moda Center in Portland on 9 April 2017, its first time in North America. Those are its three nights with the band.

Thom Yorke has also played it on his own. Closing his show at L'Olympia in Paris on 12 June 2018, he sat alone at a keyboard under a projected starry sky, hit a wrong key and drew a laugh from the room, smiled, muttered something, cut the song short and walked off. Les Inrocks' reviewer called it the best moment of the night. He played it again on four of his Japanese dates in November 2024.