Pyramid Song

Following the tour for Radiohead's third album, OK Computer (1997), Radiohead's songwriter, Thom Yorke, bought a house in Cornwall. He spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing his new grand piano.^[2] He wrote "Pyramid Song" and "Everything In Its Right Place" in the same week.^[3]

For "Everything In Its Right Place", Yorke programmed his playing into a synthesiser, but found that "Pyramid Song" sounded better untreated.^[3] He said of the composition: "The chords I'm playing involve lots of black notes. You think you're being really clever playing them but they're really simple."^[3]

"Pyramid Song" was inspired by the song "Freedom" by the jazz musician Charles Mingus, released on the 1962 album The Complete Town Hall Concert. One version of "Pyramid Song" included similar handclaps, but, according to Yorke, they sounded "naff" and so he erased them.^[3]

The lyrics were inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while Radiohead were recording in Copenhagen,^[4] and ideas of cyclical time found in Buddhism and discussed by Stephen Hawking.^[4]

Yorke first performed "Pyramid Song", which had the working title of "Nothing to Fear", at the 1999 Tibetan Freedom Concert in Amsterdam.^[5] The guitarist Jonny Greenwood described the challenge of working on the arrangement: "How do we not make it worse, how do we make it better than [Thom] just playing it by himself, which is already usually quite great?"^[6]

The basic track was recorded in Copenhagen early in the sessions for Kid A and Amnesiac.^[5] Radiohead's drummer, Philip Selway, initially found it difficult to follow the rhythm and felt that the recording session was going badly. He said the drum part "fell into place" when he stopped trying to analyse the rhythm and instead responded to the inflections in Yorke's piano and vocals.^[7]

The strings were performed by the Orchestra of St John's in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church about five miles from Radiohead's studio in Oxfordshire, where Radiohead also recorded strings for another song, "How to Disappear Completely".^[8][9] Greenwood instructed the players to swing in the style of jazz musicians.^[9] The isolated string part was included on the 2021 reissue Kid A Mnesia.^[10]

"Pyramid Song"

"Pyramid Song" features strings and an irregular rhythm.

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"Pyramid Song" is an art rock song,^[11] with elements of jazz, classical and krautrock.^[12] According to the journalist Alex Ross, Yorke's piano chords are "laced with suspended tones" and "hang mysteriously in the air, somewhere between serenity and sadness".^[13] It features a string section playing glissando harmonics.^[13] The unusual rhythm and time signature have been the subject of debate; Selway interpreted it as swung 4/4.^[7]

In a 2001 Rolling Stone interview, O'Brien said he felt "Pyramid Song" was Radiohead's best work.^[8] Selway said it "ran counter to what had come before in Radiohead in lots of ways ... The constituent parts are all quite simple, but I think the way that they then blend gives real depth to the song."^[14]

Radiohead released a computer-animated music video for "Pyramid Song", created by animation studio Shynola.^[15] In the video, inspired by a dream Yorke had, a scuba diver explores an undersea world and enters a submerged house.^[15][16] The video won the 2002 NME Carling Award for best music video.^[17]

NME named "Pyramid Song" their "single of the week",^[18] describing it as "malevolent, moving, epic". The Guardian named it "CD of the week", with the critic Alexis Petridis describing it as "a beautiful, intricately wrought mesh of complex time signatures, keening vocals, elegiac strings and subtly disturbing audio effects".^[19]

Rolling Stone placed "Pyramid Song" at number 94 on their list of the "100 Best Songs of the Decade", writing that it "might be [Yorke's] most blissful recorded moment".^[20] In October 2011, NME named it the 131st-best track of the preceding 15 years, calling it a "ghostly hymn of stunning beauty".^[21] Pitchfork named it the decade's 59th-best track, describing it as "an absolutely singular track in a catalog with no shortage of standouts".^[22] In 2020, the Guardian named "Pyramid Song" the fourth-best Radiohead song, writing: "Lyrics alluding to Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, piano seemingly exhumed from ancient civilisation and a newly spiritual Yorke, swimming with 'black-eyed angels' and a shoal of exes towards some nebulous afterlife. Torture for some; otherwise, cult-making."^[23]

"Pyramid Song" was Radiohead's first single in three years,^[24] after releasing none from their previous album, Kid A (2000).^[8] It reached number five on the UK Singles Chart,^[25] number one in Portugal,^[26] number two in Canada,^[27] number three in Norway,^[28] number six in Finland^[29] and Italy^[30] and number 10 in Ireland.^[31] It also reached the top 25 in Australia,^[32] France^[33] and the Netherlands.^[34] On the Eurochart Hot 100, it debuted at number 13, its highest position.^[35]

Adapted from the Amnesiac liner notes.^[41]