High and Dry – Amie Bailey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BciOfJsqh7M
Released in 1995 as the first single for the alternative rock band’s second album, The Bends, Radiohead’s ‘High and Dry’ is widely considered their most accessible pop track and has certainly come to rest as one of the band’s most popular songs, despite Thom Yorke’s personal negative feelings about the track. Its accessibility is perhaps the very reason Thom Yorke hates the song, stating “It’s not bad… it’s very bad”.
Originally recorded as part of the Pablo Honey sessions in 1992-93, the track was rejected from the first album for sounding “too much like a Rod Stewart song”, and Yorke claims he only went on to include it as part of The Bends under pressure from others. Perhaps a little melodramatic, ‘High and Dry’ is a far better track than Yorke gives it credit for. His crying falsetto and melancholy lyrics come together to sound a dejected plea for acceptance. Some take the lyrics to be directed towards a lover, some hear the music industry and others see a young man calling out to everyone he knows. Whichever the case may be, the track is urgently listenable despite its pensiveness, and whilst it has no doubt found a place in most teenagers’ misery collection, so many of us love it nonetheless.