I Will

older than it looks

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

dodgy kraftwerk

They tried it during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions with synthesisers, and did not like what came out. John Robinson's NME feature of 10 May 2003 has the band's verdict on that version: “dodgy Kraftwerk”.

The recording was not thrown away. The tape was rewound, and Yorke, in another room, heard the vocal melody coming the wrong way round.

That's miles better than the right way round

thom yorke, on the reversed tape

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 it turned into a piano ballad, the version on I Might Be Wrong. The 2003 site put it more simply for its readers: reverse “Like Spinning Plates” and “I Will” comes back.

down to the core

For Hail to the Thief they went the other way. The interview disc Parlophone sent to the press describes them trying to find what was good about the song without getting distracted by production or new sounds, and settling on a stripped-back arrangement that is over in under two minutes. Rolling Stone's first report on the album, in May 2003, called it a yearning ballad.

Jonny Greenwood gave Chuck Klosterman the other half of the story. Some songs on the record, “Sail to the Moon” among them, only came together once the whole band had worked on them. This was not one of those.

fully formed and was immediately perfect

jonny greenwood · spin, july 2003

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 sleeping. At least 408 people died.

The lyric is a parent's vow in the first person, to go underground rather than let it 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.)”.

eighteen nights

It was first played in Lisbon on 22 July 2002, on the tour where the new songs were tried out, and twice more that week; after Porto on 27 July it was gone for 310 days. It returned on 2 June 2003 in the MusiquePlus studios in Montreal and was played fifteen times that year. The last is The Point in Dublin on 3 December 2003. Eighteen nights, and none since.

los angeles, and left off

An alternative take recorded in Los Angeles came out on Com Lag (2plus2isfive), released in Japan and Australia on 24 March 2004. When Yorke posted his own running order for the album in 2008 he left “I Will” off. The 2025 live album kept it, and Rob Sheffield picked out its quiet as doing as much for the record's political anger as the loud songs do.