Sail to the Moon

five minutes, for noah

Thom Yorke said it took him five minutes to write, and it is about his infant son, Noah, though in July 2003 he told Andrew Mueller that it was not written for the boy and only became his afterwards. The words take Noah's namesake at his word, with a flood and an ark, and the child is the one who builds it and steers everybody off the planet. The line people remember hopes he might grow up to be president and still know right from wrong. On a record whose title went back to the disputed 2000 election, that was not a neutral wish.

Yorke told Chuck Klosterman that fatherhood had changed what he worried about.

Having a son has made me very concerned about the future.

thom yorke · spin, july 2003

The full title adds “(Brush the Cobwebs out of the Sky.)”.

half an idea

Jonny Greenwood did not rate the song as Yorke brought it in. It had different chords then and, in Greenwood's words, only half an idea. It came together once the five of them worked out its structure, and Greenwood credited Phil Selway with seeing how it should be arranged.

'Sail to the Moon' wasn't very well-written.

jonny greenwood · spin, july 2003

It was sixth of the eight new songs Radiohead opened with at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 22 July 2002, the first night of their Iberian try-out run. NME's Johnny Davis heard a delayed riff fed through Ed O'Brien's effects pedals. Three months later Yorke played it on his own at the Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View, California, on both nights, 26 and 27 October, and dedicated it on the first to the people who had marched for peace in San Francisco that weekend.

the ballad in the middle

The band recorded the album at Ocean Way in Hollywood and at their own studio between September 2002 and February 2003. It is the third track, a slow piano ballad close to a lullaby, and it keeps changing its time signature.

Alexis Petridis, otherwise cool on the album in the Guardian, picked it out as one of the places where some light gets in, and Sasha Frere-Jones named it his favourite in Slate.

Three days before the album came out in America, at the Field Day festival in Giants Stadium, New Jersey, on 7 June 2003, a crowd that had stood in the rain for most of the day went quiet for it.

In November 2003 the History Channel in Britain ran its piano under the trailers for its Remembrance Week coverage. Christopher O'Riley put a solo piano version on Hold Me To This, his second album of Radiohead songs, released by Harmonia Mundi on 12 April 2005.

after the tour

Sixty-six of its 83 nights came in 2003, the year of the album. After Indio on 1 May 2004 it was gone for 744 days, back at Wolverhampton Civic Hall on 15 May 2006, and in 2008 it came back once more, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Charlotte on 9 May, where Yorke dedicated it to the people of North Carolina.

Yorke brought it back alone on 26 October 2024 at Spark Arena in Auckland, his first live performance of it since that Charlotte night, by Rolling Stone's count. A live take is the third track of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), released by XL on 13 August 2025, and Molly Mary O'Brien at Pitchfork singled out its chordal backing.

ophelia's song

In Hamlet Hail to the Thief, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Factory International production Yorke made with Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, it belongs to Ophelia. Ami Tredrea sings it before her death. The production opened at Aviva Studios in Manchester in April 2025 and moved to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon for 4–28 June. Daniel Dylan Wray, reviewing it for Pitchfork, picked it as the moment where song and scene fit best.