Hey have you heard Radiohead has a new album out? Yeah, they do! It’s called King of Limbs, and “I’m not sure how I feel about it yet”, scrunchy face. Well if you need a slight break but need your Thom Yorke fill, check out his contribution to 2009 album Ciao My Shining Star: The Songs of Mark Mulcahy. The album was recorded for musician Mark Mulcahy, whose wife suddenly died of cancer the year before. She met him while he was performing at a hotel in Massachusetts and was the inspiration for and driving force behind his music. Left with their three-year old twins to take care of, he didn’t have time to tour or record anymore, so all of the contributing artists from Michael Stipe to The National donated their recordings of his songs, so the royalties from the album would go back to Mulcahy.
Even without this knowledge, you savor every bit of the five minutes and thirty seconds this song lasts, and yet it somehow always still feels like it slipped away from you by its end. It’s a song made for the repeat button because damn that’s some pretty perfect percussion. Like most things Thom Yorke does, I could not at first comprehend how what I was hearing was real. His brother Andy Yorke lends backing vocals that act as a warming blanket beneath the words. It’s a song that takes you away to another place not of this Earth (literally, where am I?); a place between now and eternity, where, for lack of a better term, everything is in its right place – not because all is going perfectly to plan, but because everything makes sense. The realization that every experience you’ve ever had, every triumph, every heartache, has led up to this here person you are now. The notion that this world is both ours and uniquely yours. Okay that may be a bit of Buddhist bullshit but come on, it’s Thom Yorke on a Sunday morning and….have you heard this song?
