I Will

older than it looks

In June 2003 Thom Yorke told David Fricke that “I Will” was already three or four years old. The 2003 version of this site went further back, telling its readers they had first met the song in Meeting People Is Easy, Grant Gee's 1998 film of the OK Computer tour.

dodgy kraftwerk

It goes back to the band's sessions in Copenhagen in 1999, and the Kid A sessions could not get it right. Ed O'Brien's studio diary has them playing it live in the studio that December, going back to the Copenhagen version, and picking it up again at the end of February 2000 with Jonny Greenwood on organ and everyone hunting for rhythm parts. That week, O'Brien wrote, they spent a lot of time “throwing shit” at it, and Greenwood was sick of hearing the phrase. Looking back in NME in 2003, the band called what they made of it with synthesisers “dodgy Kraftwerk”.

The recording was not thrown away. Yorke, in another room, heard the vocal melody coming the wrong way round and thought it much better than the right way round. He spent the rest of the night learning to sing the backwards melody, and the band built a new song around the reversed recording, “Like Spinning Plates”, on Amnesiac in 2001. On tour that one turned into a piano ballad, the version on I Might Be Wrong.

down to the core

For Hail to the Thief they went the other way. The interview disc Parlophone sent to the press describes them looking for what was good in the song without getting distracted by production or new sounds, and settling on a stripped-back arrangement that is over in under two minutes. An alternative take, the “Los Angeles version”, came out on Com Lag (2plus2isfive) in 2004.

After all that, Greenwood remembered it differently. He told Chuck Klosterman that some songs on the record, such as “Sail to the Moon”, only came together once the whole band had worked on them, and that this one had arrived complete.

fully formed and was immediately perfect

jonny greenwood · spin, july 2003

When Yorke posted his own running order for the album in 2008 he left “I Will” off. Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), in 2025, kept it, and Rob Sheffield, reviewing that for Rolling Stone, found its quiet doing as much for the record's political anger as the loud songs.

no man's land

Yorke called it the angriest song he had ever written. It came from news footage of the bombing of the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. At 4.30 in the morning of 13 February 1991, during the Gulf War, two American F-117s each dropped a laser-guided bomb on Public Shelter No. 25, where hundreds of civilians, most of them women and children, were sheltering, many of them asleep. At least 408 people died.

The lyric is a parent's vow in the first person, to lie down in a bunker underground and not let this happen to his children, and it ends by repeating one image of children's eyes until the song stops. The full title adds “(No Man's Land.)”.

tried out in portugal

It was first played in Lisbon on 22 July 2002, on the summer run where the new songs were tried out, and after Porto on 27 July it was gone for 310 days. It came back on 2 June 2003 in the MusiquePlus studios in Montreal, and Dublin on 3 December 2003 is the latest of its 18 nights.

checking it was them

The unfinished mixes of the whole album leaked online on 30 March 2003, ten weeks before it came out. The next morning Greenwood wrote on the band's message board that he felt bemused, not annoyed, and that he had downloaded only one track so far, to check it really was them. It was “I Will”.