Entranced in the Music

Ok, I’ll admit it. The first minute I heard Thom Yorke’s voice I developed one of the longest lasting rock-star crushes to date (second only, of course, to Bono). The tangled up chords that echo in his voice make me putty in his hands. I don’t care about the fact that he has one lazy eye or that he’s a bit on the short side. The fact that he can write such haunting lyrics and sing them with such poignancy makes me adore him even more.

I think it all began in 1995 – that was the Christmas when my Uncle Rick gave me a CD of Radiohead’s second album, “The Bends.” I had asked for this album, because, as a stellar eighth grader, I wanted to be cool enough to own what Q and Rolling Stone called one of it’s “Must Have Albums.” I was done with trying to identify with the likes of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith – artists that I had grown up with throughout the years as a student of a private Baptist school and a child of an Evangelical church – for me, those days were over.

I remember pouring over “The Bends” CD package, complete with obscure drawings and introspective lyrics, as I sat on my Grandmother’s art deco couch, and absorbing everything I saw in it before I had even heard a single song. My Uncle Rick looked over my shoulder and said, “Yeah, that album’s great. It’s one of my favorites.” This, of course, made me like Radiohead even more as my Uncle Rick, in those days at least, was the epitome of cool. He was the only one in my mom’s family who ventured out into the big city of Chicago, bought a fancy apartment at Lakeshore, became successful, and stayed there to make a life for himself. This had always been my dream, even as a teenager, so the fact that he was living it made him almost a god to me at that time.

Radiohead quickly became one of my favorite bands as well and I found myself constantly entranced with the lyrics on “The Bends.” Pretty soon after acquiring the album I noticed my poetry started sounding like Radiohead songs and all of the pictures I saved on my computer were either images of Thom Yorke or Bjork.

And that is how my incestuous love affair with the music of Radiohead began. So when I saw this video of Thom Yorke’s latest song, “The Present Tense,” on YouTube today, I was hooked. After downloading it I think I have played it a total of five times so far, and I’m sure that that number will only multiply as the days go on.

There are not many artists out there today who can enrapture me the way Thom Yorke does. Bono used to but once he started going mainstream pop with U2 in the mid-1990’s that was the end for me. In fact, a lot of the bands/artists I used to like lost a lot of their fervor in the mid to late 1990’s, which really is quite sad given their music will never quite be the same ever again. But, for me at least, Thom Yorke and his band, Radiohead, have remained steadfastly good throughout the decades no matter what. And that's made all the difference.