Reckoner

the older song first

The name reached the stage six years before this song did. The archive's first “Reckoner” is an older, heavier one, played at George, Washington, on 23 June 2001, and the title was still on Thom Yorke's chalk list in the studio in September 2005.

In between, in April 2005, Yorke sang a song called “Reckoner” alone at the Trade Justice Movement's all-night vigil in Westminster. Carl Cullinane, reviewing In Rainbows for Cherwell, Oxford's student paper, remembered a line in it asking for a fair price. That line and most of the 2005 arrangement are gone from the album, and Cullinane's argument was that the idea had moved out of the song and into the way the record was sold.

the tail of another song

What became the record grew out of a coda the band wrote while working on “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses”. The song it came from went its own way and came out in 2009 on a Yorke 12-inch, and the coda kept the title the band already had. Unusually for them, they liked it straight away and finished it quickly after cutting a demo.

People [were] all over the house, shaking things and getting this groove going, then chopping it up into little pieces and putting it back together. It was a lot of fun.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 27 april 2012

Yorke sings it in falsetto over clanging percussion and piano, and Jonny Greenwood arranged the strings. Yorke has said the wandering guitar figure is a nod to John Frusciante, “in my sort of clunky ‘can't-really-pick’ kind of way”.

saint peter, apparently

Colin Greenwood pointed out that a reckoner is a biblical figure, Saint Peter doing the counting at the gate. Yorke said he had no idea. He had let the melody pull the words along rather than think about them, and called it “kind of a love song… sort of”. He has also said the line about separating like ripples on a blank shore is the centre of In Rainbows, with everything on the record either leading to it or moving away from it.

I'm singing those words because I have to sing those words.

thom yorke · all songs considered, npr, 14 february 2008

a satellite and a guitar

The band played it live for the first time in Thumbs Down, their webcast from the Oxford studio on 9 November 2007. Two years later Yorke played it alone on an acoustic guitar to end the New York premiere of The Age of Stupid, Franny Armstrong's film about climate change, appearing on the big screen by satellite from somewhere he kept secret. Asked afterwards if he had anything to add, he said the concept of limitless economic growth was dead: “We have to come up with another plan.” In December 2018 Yorke added it to his solo shows, on guitar to open the first encore at the Masonic Temple in Detroit on 2 December and again at the Chicago Theatre two nights later.

The archive has 180 nights of it with the band, and the song came back in Madrid on 5 November 2025.

the stems, again

After doing it for “Nude”, the band put the separate parts of this one on iTunes at the end of September 2008, all six for the price of a single track, so that anyone could remix it, with the entries hosted and voted on at their own site. James Holden, Flying Lotus and Diplo each made one. The sales took the song to number 74 in Britain and 21 on the American Bubbling Under chart, and a fan's animated film for it was one of the four winners of that summer's Aniboom contest.

It had already found a film of its own. The band gave it to Choke, the film of Chuck Palahniuk's novel, and it plays over the closing credits.