Covering Radiohead can’t be easy. I mean, if any fan base is going to put your interpretation of a band’s work under a microscope and post thesis-length explanations of its shortcomings on reddit, it’s Radiohead’s fan base.
To me, the best Radiohead covers (or the best covers of anything, really) are those that take the emotional heart of the song and transplant it into a completely different body. See Mark Ronson’s funk adaptation of “Just” for a prime example.
Or, see Lianne La Havas’ wonderful interpretation of “Weird Fishes.”
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. It doesn’t simply transplant the song’s heart into a different body, but it brings you into the operating room to view the procedure; in the opening two bars, the drums tease the original fast-pace before cutting the tempo in half. It’s like she’s announcing, “yes, I like the original too, but I’m here to re-form it, not re-produce it.”
2. The arpeggiated guitars towards the end feel like they are straight out of La Havas’ vocabulary. They could almost have been sampled from her 2015 single “Green & Gold.”
3. The final two minutes, already powerful and heart-squeezing in the original, work just as well with the more laid-back tempo here.
The repeated lyric of the last two minutes really gets me: only Radiohead could have a line sound equally full of hope and despair: “Hit the bottom and escape.” Thom Yorke could just have easily given us “Break the ceiling and escape,” but that would be too emotionally straightforward. Instead, we’re left wondering if this is a song of dark triumph or bright failure. Or something in between.
Recommended listening activity:
Wearing a raincoat on a sunny day.