True Love Waits

brussels

They played it for the first time in Brussels in December 1995, on The Bends tour: Yorke on acoustic guitar, Jonny Greenwood laying an airy keyboard line over the top. It stayed in that shape for years, turning up whenever Yorke played alone, and it became the best-known Radiohead song nobody could buy. Bootlegs of it circulated for two decades.

too easy

They worked on it for OK Computer and threw it out. Yorke's objection was that they had already made enough songs out of a voice and an acoustic guitar, and doing this one that way would be too easy.

To Thom's credit, he needs to feel a song has validation, that it has a reason to exist as a recording.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

Godrich put the other half of it more bluntly: they were not interested in making something that sounded like John Mayer. Keyboard loops recorded in that period survived, and came out on OKNOTOK in 2017; other attempts from those sessions leaked in 2019, one with spacey synths and a wah-wah, another that NME called “very 90s”, with a big bassline and prog organ.

the version that became another song

They tried again during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions. Ed O'Brien, writing in his online diary in January 2000:

[It has] been kicking around for about four years now and each time we approached it we seemed to be going down the same old paths. It actually sounds like the start of something exciting now.

ed o'brien · online diary, january 2000

What they built this time was electronic, using those old keyboard loops. Rolling Stone later described the result as full-on electro-glitch, with ominous synthesisers and Rhodes piano. They abandoned it too.

We felt like ‘True Love Waits’ was this wholesome acoustic thing, and then suddenly putting this quite fierce thing… We weren't sure if it was the right thing, so it fell by the wayside.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 3 november 2021

Rather than waste it, they cut it up and built “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” out of the pieces. The abandoned version itself finally appeared on Kid A Mnesia in 2021, and Rob Sheffield's verdict was that this was the one they should have put out in the first place.

the live release

On the Amnesiac tour Yorke played it alone several times, and one of those performances went onto I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings. Mac Randall read that as proof the band knew exactly what was circulating among their own fans, while also thinking the chosen take weaker than the bootlegs.

One gets the feeling that this was a song Radiohead knew they liked and knew audiences liked but the band never came to grips with an arrangement for it; finally they threw up their hands, putting it out as it is.

mac randall · exit music

Godrich's own description of that version, years later, was “shitty”. Pitchfork disagreed at the time, calling it “absolutely gorgeous” and saying it could hold its own against anything on OK Computer.

the doorway into another song

From 2006 the band used it differently: a slower reading on Rhodes piano, played as the way into “Everything in Its Right Place”. Looser and lighter than the acoustic version, it let the words sound romantic rather than desperate. Yorke kept playing it at his own shows too, at Latitude in 2009 and the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 2010.

the last track

More than twenty years after it was written, it closed A Moon Shaped Pool. The guitar is gone. What is left is one piano figure with more pianos overdubbed onto it until the loops fall into polyrhythm, bass arriving in the second verse, in the tradition of “Videotape” and the other slow closers.

Yorke explained the first verse as being about the distance between young and old, a narrator offering never to grow up if that is what it takes. The line about lollipops and crisps came from a story he read about a child left alone for a week who lived on snacks. The refrain just repeats: don't leave.

One of my mistakes is dismissing things because they're simple… ‘True Love Waits’ was a bit like that. It was one of those things where it was almost made to be at the end of a show. It wasn't even necessarily made to be recorded. It was made to say, ‘OK, guys, goodnight. Thanks.’

thom yorke · rolling stone, 8 september 2023

It was never a single, and it charted anyway, in France and on the US Hot Rock Songs list.

twenty-four nights

The archive has it at 24 performances between 1995 and 2018, six of them closing the show. They played the new arrangement on the A Moon Shaped Pool tour, and then in South America in 2018 Yorke went back to standing there alone with an acoustic guitar.