True Love Waits (song)
"True Love Waits" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead, released on their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool (2016).
Radiohead and their producer, Nigel Godrich, attempted to record "True Love Waits" several times, experimenting with different styles, but could not settle on an arrangement.
In 2016, Radiohead released "True Love Waits" as the closing track on A Moon Shaped Pool, rearranged as a minimal piano ballad.
[2] In his online diary, the guitarist Ed O'Brien wrote in January 2000 that "True Love Waits" had "been kicking around for about four years now and each time we approached it we seemed to be going down the same old paths.
[2]During this period, Radiohead created an electronic version of "True Love Waits" using the keyboard loops recorded in the OK Computer sessions, but discarded it.
[1] According to the Phoenix New Times, "This is a looser, lighter take ... without the clear chord changes and forceful desperation of the acoustic version, one that somehow emphasises the romantic quality of the lyrics rather than the loneliness.
"[1] In 2016, more than 20 years after it was written, Radiohead released "True Love Waits" as the last track on their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, in a minimal piano arrangement.
[2] The lines "And true love lives / On lollipops and crisps" were inspired by a story Yorke read about a child left alone by his parents for a week who survived by eating snacks.
"[16] Reviewing I Might Be Wrong in 2001, Matt LeMay of Pitchfork wrote that Yorke's solo performance of "True Love Waits" was "absolutely gorgeous" and could "hold its own against any song on OK Computer".
[18] Nicholas Taylor of PopMatters described the performance as "a bittersweet victory of love" that "shows that behind all of Radiohead's modernist nightmares is a fragile, desperate desire to connect, fully and meaningfully, with just one person".
"[3] In Pitchfork, Jayson Greene and Jeremy D Larson wrote that the work-in-progress versions of "True Love Waits" released on MiniDiscs [Hacked] did not work and demonstrated why Radiohead had struggled to record the song.
[25] Similarly, the New Republic writer Ryan Kearney wrote that it was "no coincidence that the only moving song on the album, 'True Love Waits', was written two decades ago".
[26] Steve Jozef of the Phoenix New Times felt the piano arrangement captured the best elements of Yorke's live performances, saving it from sentimentality, and was the album's "most straightforward, unpretentious and emotionally raw composition".
[1] The Rolling Stone critic Andy Beta wrote that "the effect is like stumbling upon an old love letter years after a relationship has grown cold", and that whereas the "don't leave" refrain once suggested redemption, it now sounded like a goodbye.
[27] In the Guardian, Jazz Monroe wrote: "Even when they’re not facing the abyss, Radiohead songs tend to operate in its general vicinity, albeit without revealing what led there.
[29] In The Arizona Republic, Ed Masley wrote that the new arrangement "heightens the sense of desperate yearning in Yorke's vocal as he begs his lover not to leave".
[19] Another Pitchfork critic, Nathan Reese, wrote: "'True Love Waits' is an elegiac coda to one of Radiohead's most inward-facing albums and a fitting treatment to a song that many already considered a classic.
