Optimistic

a desert and a rehearsal room

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

This was written in 1998. Me and Jonny were traveling through the desert somewhere.

thom yorke, on stage, quoted in rolling stone, 2 october 2020

In July 1999 O'Brien wrote in his online diary that he loved the words, and that the line about something crawling out of a swamp reminded him of PJ Harvey's blues. It was the most band-shaped thing they had in a year spent trying not to be one. On 7 October 1999 they recorded it live in a room, about nine times over.

possibly my favourite band song that is played together live in a room

ed o'brien · radiohead.com diary, 7 october 1999

The penultimate take, he thought, was the one.

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, advice that Andrew Smith of The Observer was told she gave him often. Smith 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, walked through the harmony: a bass line climbing through A minor on the first line of the chorus, a jump of a semitone into a B-flat whole-tone scale on the second, and a resolution on D major. His reading was that the reassurance is not entirely ironic. Jer Fairall in PopMatters heard scorn in it, and noted that its nod to Orwell's Animal Farm is about as explicit as Yorke gets. Simon Reynolds in Spin heard a song looking sourly at the world, and early Echo & the Bunnymen in the sound.

the one on the radio

There were no singles from Kid A and no videos. But Lauren Zoric in The Guardian reported in September 2000 that “Optimistic”, the rock-est moment on the album, with its driving bass and almost military drumming, would go to American radio as a promo-only lead track. Billboard had the date: Capitol sent the promotional CD to rock stations on 18 September. It climbed to number 10 on the Modern Rock chart, and Airplay Monitor's year-end lists had it 78th for 2000 and 90th for 2001.

Brent DiCrescenzo's Pitchfork review said it “stomps like mating Tyrannosaurs”, and called it the best summary of what the band used to be good at. Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone heard an open homage to R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, sung in one of Michael Stipe's favourite rhythms, and elsewhere a Blind Faith hook. Chris DeVille at Stereogum thought it probably the most underrated song they have.

It went onto Radiohead: The Best Of in 2008 and Kid A Mnesia in 2021.

on stage

It went into the set at the Théâtre Antique in Arles on 13 June 2000, nearly four months before anyone could buy it: 37 nights that year, ten in 2001, then nothing until 2008, which had 35. It came back once in 2016 and eight times in 2018, then vanished for 2,656 days after the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 1 August 2018, returning at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 8 November 2025. The latest is the Uber Arena in Berlin on 9 December 2025. Of its 102 nights, 22 opened with it.