Radiohead was my favorite band when I was a young adult. There was WOW, where my sister and I would drive and sit and read from the wall of rock magazines, many of them British.

in 1997, when I was a depressed and lonely 17 year old, I bought OK Computer right after it was released, because I had read some buzz on it. I was so hooked in by it, that I remember I stayed up all night, listening to it over and over, even though it was a school night.

On The Ground, anti war group at Columbia College.

A good chunk of the songs I have written have been about trying to apprehend war from the point of view of the people experiencing it from the ground. Scatterbrain is a song that I wish I had written. Perhaps it had similar goals.

Ther are two meanings that stick out for me. One is the description of a warzone. The literal reality of having one’s brains scattered.

The other is partly the feeling of living in the internet age, and the information overload that makes it impossible to think and feel grounded. “Everyone, everything, all of the time” as it is described in Idioteque.

I feel like I grew out of the passionate attachment I had to Radiohead, even though I am still arrested by there music whenever I hear it.

What could otherwise have been a wistful, slightly melancholy california-folk song. Starts with fairly conventional romantic lyrics:

“I want you to know He’s not coming back Look into my eyes I’m not coming back”

But then

Much of Radiohead’s best music (like R.E.M.’s before them) suffers from diminsishing marginal return on textual analysis or close reading of the lyrics. So much of the magic exists not in the naked lunch of the words on a page, but in a vocal presentation that is at once present and distant. Sometimes, Thom Yorke’s lyrics, placed end-to-end, don’t always tell a coherent story, but they do allow him to pursue vectors of suggestive, emotive musicality that . anI find this music to be emotionally slippery, highly ambivalent, self-reflexive, and at once vulnerable and guarded.

These songs are surreal in the sense that much of the meaning is assembled from

Like the half-whited-out images in the artwork of OK Computer, the sung imagery is mostly suggestive. The singing is distinct, and plaintive, melancholy, desparate.

Ambivalence pervades the very enunciation of the words “I’m not coming back” sounds like “It might come back”

“drawn you abath”, but really sung as if he is saying “drown you a bath” Thom Yorke sounds like he is being forced to eat the mouse. I hear resigned terror. Are we the sadistic toruturers, taking pleasure in “Squash his head; put him in the pot”? (first time singing) Or are we victims resigned to the fate of what we are being forced to do (second time)

I have a distinct memory of hearing this song on a “college” radio station while on tour with Low Skies, probably in 2001. We were a three piece band, but for the tour, we had a cargo van with only two seats. We put an old couch in the back, and I laid on it for the tour. All of the heavy amps and drums were behind me, but they weren’t tied down and there was no wall in the van between me and them. Needless to say, that is a terribly dangerous way to travel. Many touring musicians have been killed by their own fyling equipment in van wrecks over the years. Maybe I understood the danger a little, because I wore an old football helmet I found, but I did ride across the bulk of the Continental US that way.