Creativity Quote by Ed O'Brien

Tracklisting sounds like clerical work until you remember who’s talking: a member of Radiohead, a band that treats an album less like a container of songs and more like a psychological itinerary. Ed O’Brien’s “massive, massive” isn’t just emphasis; it’s a tell. The repetition performs the anxiety of choice in an era where music is atomized into singles, shuffled playlists, and algorithmic mood buckets. For “a band like us,” the stakes are different: sequence is authorship.

The intent here is quietly defensive. O’Brien is pushing back against the casual listener’s assumption that ordering is cosmetic, a leftover from the CD age. For Radiohead, tracklisting is composition-by-other-means: tension, release, misdirection, the careful placement of silence and abrasion. Put the wrong song too early and you drain the suspense; put it too late and you lose the nerve. The subtext is that Radiohead’s identity lives in transitions as much as in tracks. Their albums are designed to be entered, endured, and exited, not merely sampled.

Context matters because “tracklisting” is also internal politics. Bands don’t just arrange songs; they negotiate taste, ego, and competing visions of what the record is trying to do. Calling it a “task” makes it sound practical, even mundane, but the doubled “massive” admits it’s actually a referendum on meaning: which songs deserve the spotlight, what story gets told, what kind of listener the band is willing to be for. In a culture that rewards speed, the line is a small manifesto for deliberateness.