True Love Waits

brussels

Radiohead played it for the first time in Brussels in December 1995, on The Bends tour, with Thom Yorke on acoustic guitar and Jonny Greenwood laying an airy keyboard line over the top. It stayed a song for voice and acoustic guitar for years, later turning up as Yorke's solo spot in the encores, and with bootlegs of it going round for two decades it became one of the best-known Radiohead songs with no studio release.

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 also said, more bluntly, that they were not interested in making something that sounded like John Mayer. Keyboard loops recorded then 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 with a big bassline and prog organ.

approach number 561

They tried again during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, building it this time out of those old keyboard loops. In January 2000 Ed O'Brien wrote in his diary that every attempt had gone down the same old paths and that this one sounded like the start of something exciting. On 9 February he put it at something like approach number 561. The vocal melody had stayed and the chords under it had changed, and he allowed that the band might have lost the plot on this song altogether.

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 appeared on Kid A Mnesia in 2021, and Rob Sheffield thought it 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, in his biography Exit Music, read the choice as the band admitting defeat, since they knew their fans loved the song and had never found an arrangement of their own, so they released it as it stood. He also thought the chosen take weaker than the bootlegs. Godrich's word for that version, years later, was “shitty”. Matt LeMay, reviewing the record for Pitchfork at the time, disagreed, and put it up against anything on OK Computer.

the first line

On stage it ended five shows between 2001 and 2003. At Shepherd's Bush Empire on 25 May 2003, the last of seven nights in small halls before Hail to the Thief, Yorke came back alone with an acoustic guitar for a third encore of it, its first outing of the year, and could not remember how it started. He broke off grinning, went to the front of the stage and asked the crowd what the first line was. NME has him stopping twice and asking the front row both times.

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 it for his own shows too, and at Latitude in 2009 he introduced it as another song that had fallen off the shelf once and was still there.

the last track

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

Yorke explained the line about dressing like your niece as being about the difference between young and old, a narrator offering never to grow up if that is what it takes to keep someone. The line about lollipops and crisps came from a story he read about a child left alone in a house for a week, living on snacks. It was never a single, and it charted anyway, in France and on the American Hot Rock Songs list.

On stage it came back in the record's arrangement in Paris on 23 May 2016, after six years away, and in South America in 2018 Yorke went back to playing it alone on an acoustic guitar.

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