Optimistic

a desert and a rehearsal room

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood wrote it in 1998, travelling through a desert somewhere. Yorke told a crowd so on the 2018 tour, introducing it from the stage, and added that it seemed more relevant now than it had then.

In July 1999 Ed O'Brien wrote in his online diary that he loved the words, and that the line about something crawling out of a swamp put him in mind of PJ Harvey's blues. By September he was calling it the most finished of the new songs and worrying that it was still not on tape. The band had played “Lift” all through 1996 and then left it off OK Computer.

on to ‘optimistic’ -must record that soon before we lose it (remember ‘lift’?).

ed o'brien · radiohead.com diary, 9 september 1999

They got it on 7 October, live in a room, about nine times over, and O'Brien thought the penultimate take was the one. He called it possibly his favourite song the band had played together live in a room.

good enough

The chorus was not written as a lyric. It was what Yorke's partner, Rachel Owen, told him when he despaired of the record, and Andrew Smith of The Observer, who was told she said it often, counted it among the very few lines on Kid A that needed no explaining.

Whether it is meant straight is another matter. Will Byers, writing about the music of optimism in The Guardian in 2009, followed the chorus as it climbs and then lands on a major chord, and read the reassurance as not entirely ironic. Jer Fairall in PopMatters heard scorn, and a nod to Animal Farm about as plain as Yorke gets.

the one on the radio

Kid A had no commercial single and no official video. Lauren Zoric reported in The Guardian that September that the album's rockiest song would go to American radio all the same, and Capitol sent it to rock stations on 18 September; it climbed to number 10 on the Modern Rock chart. Brent DiCrescenzo's Pitchfork review called it the best summary of what the band used to be good at, and Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone heard R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People in it, sung in one of Michael Stipe's favourite rhythms.

Eight years later, introducing it at The Woodlands outside Houston, Yorke remembered how Kid A had gone down at home, and the crowd sang the high parts with him.

Back in England, they thought we had lost it. We thought that was the point.

thom yorke · the woodlands, 17 may 2008, in the austin chronicle

in and out of the set

It was first played at Arles in June 2000, and 22 of its 102 nights have started with it. After the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it was gone for 2,656 days, until the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 8 November 2025.

Another long silence ran from Yokohama in October 2001 to the spring of 2008, and it ended in front of a few hundred competition winners at the BBC Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House on 1 April 2008, where the band played two free sets for three BBC networks. “Optimistic” came back in the first set. The band were not happy with it, and when the set was over they played it again as the only encore.