Sail to the Moon

five minutes, for noah

Thom Yorke wrote it for his infant son, Noah, and said it took him five minutes. The words take the boy's namesake at his word: there is a flood, there is 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.)”. It is one of the songs on the album that reach for heaven and hell, which Radiohead had not done before.

half an idea

Jonny Greenwood did not rate the song as Yorke brought it in. It had different chords then and, in his words, only half an idea. It came together once the five of them worked out its structure, and he credited Philip 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. This is the third track: a slow, lullaby-like piano ballad that 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 one of his favourites in Slate. Ten years on, Michael Nelson at Stereogum called it “the basest 'Pyramid Song' retread imaginable”.

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.

on stage

The archive has it on 85 nights: 9 in 2002, 68 in 2003, six in 2004. After Indio on 1 May 2004 it was gone for 744 days, back at Wolverhampton Civic Hall on 15 May 2006, and it turned up only once more, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Charlotte on 9 May 2008. That is the last Radiohead performance in the archive.

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. A student essay in Varsity called her “Sail to the Moon” the moment in the whole evening that landed hardest.