Thursday, October 11, 2007

15 Step


you used to be alright
what happened?
did the cat get your tongue?
did your string come undone?
one by one
in procession
it comes to us all
it’s as soft as your pillow

you used to be alright
what happened?
et cetera et cetera
fads for whatever
15 steps then a sheer drop

how come I end up where I started?
how come I end up where I went wrong?
won’t take my eyes off the ball again
you reel me out then
you cut the string


The first song, "15 Step", starts with ‘How come I end up where I started? How come I end up where I went wrong?’. This seems to fit you guys. Every idealism dies in the cynicism of reality. For example, when I arrived here I started thinking: Oh God, these guys are no logo, but gosh, there’s a label on my T-shirt and one on my jacket as well. Then I started looking around and the only thing I saw was logos.

Thom (pointing at his own white trainers): Here, a logo as well! You can’t escape it. I wrote this album from a very harmonious thought. I didn’t want to fight anything, but at the same time I didn’t want to be apathetic. That kind of mood. The others caught up on it as well – that it was a personal record, or at least a human one. It felt good not to attack in any way for once. I didn’t want to judge everything, just sing like how I am, like what I’m feeling. (???)

Is it hard not to judge yourself as well?

Thom: I’m only human, so... it’s about me, but... [long sighing] I’ll let this question pass.
--Oor (2007)


John: “15 Step”, where does this figure in that timeline that we were just discussing in such great detail?

Thom: [laughs] Um, uh…

John: Is it worth trying?

Thom: Yeah, no. It was kind of a cool one because um… uh, I think for a lot of people it was a sort of breakthrough song for us because it came together very fast. I mean, what you just heard is basically one take, um, with almost nothing changed at all. Um… uh… so and it was… it evolved in a very interesting way as well because it was originally extremely electronic, and very much sort of… um, stripped, and noisy. Um, and then we sort of wanted to work out a way of doing it live, um, and then out of that came the one that you heard. And it’s sort of just, you know, everything’s sort of… it turned into something… we agonized over like whether um, the real scrouchy electronic one was good, or whether this one was good, and it was a sort of blindingly obvious that what we ended up with was miles better. And it was very much in the sort of vein of when we finished Kid A and stuff, like say, “Idioteque”, which was, you know, has a very specific sort of sound on the record and then when we sort of try to work out how to play it live, it became something even more sort of bigger and madder. Uh, and the “15 Step” is sort of the same sort of thing, really. Um, it’s sort of got an important lesson that we learned during that period.
--2008-01-03 | XFM Radio Interview

3 comments:

lulu said...

hey thanks so much for the lyrics. this song is my favourite :)

Unknown said...

this doesn't seem to be complete

wierd fishee said...

Yes, but that's from the official lyrics booklet, so I decided to leave them like that. There are other lines in other songs that are wrong, but that's what they gave us, so since we're never absolutely sure what Thom is singing, I decided to just transcribe from the lyrics booklet.