I Might Be Wrong

first heard in monza

The archive's first night for it is the Villa Reale in Monza on 19 June 2000, almost a year before Amnesiac came out. The 2003 version of this site noted the date, liked the beat and the groove, and predicted it would be a favourite once it was released.

On the record it is built on Jonny Greenwood's riff, a cyclical figure in drop D, over a metallic, trance-like pulse. Chris DeVille at Stereogum, looking back twenty years later, heard the band inventing a different sort of guitar song for themselves, a hard shell built round the riff with Thom Yorke breathing out over sparse arpeggios inside it.

what rachel said

Yorke told Nick Kent at Mojo that the song was a record of a complete crisis point. What got him out was a piece of advice from his partner, Rachel Owen, which she had been giving him all along.

Be proud of what you've done. Don't look back and just carry on like nothing's happened.

rachel owen, quoted by thom yorke · mojo, june 2001

He said he only really heard it after months of what he called utter torment, and that hearing it is what the song is about.

socks and aftershave

It went to radio as a promotional single in June 2001, and it had two videos. Sophie Muller directed one, and Chris Bran, who had made half of the short animated blips that stood in for videos on Kid A, made the other, mostly in black and white, which went up on radiohead.com in July.

That summer the International Olympic Committee came asking for it for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, for a campaign meant to interest young people in the Games. Yorke told Q the band were tempted, and wary of the sponsors who hang around the Olympics. In the end they gave music to the campaign without a fee, on condition that no corporate advertising or sponsorship appeared in the ads, and Ed O'Brien told MTV News that money had nothing to do with it.

We don't do adverts for socks or aftershave.

ed o'brien · mtv news, june 2001

two of them on the radio

Its busiest year on stage was 2003, with 42 nights, and that year it also went out stripped down. Yorke and Jonny played it as a pair on the radio, for KCRW at Electric Lady Studios in New York in June, for KROQ in the Capitol Records Tower in Los Angeles in September, and for Radio 1 at Maida Vale in December.

It came back for 20 nights in 2012 and then went quiet for four years, from Sydney on 13 November 2012 to Miami on 30 March 2017. The latest of its 173 nights is Philadelphia on 31 July 2018.

the name on the live record

In September a band spokesperson told NME it would be the third single from Amnesiac. Instead it grew into I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings, eight songs from the 2001 tour, released on 12 November that year and named after this one. The take of the title song on it comes from the homecoming show in South Park, Oxford, on 7 July 2001, in front of about 40,000 people.