"I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day"

Thom Yorke describes a creative process fueled by both rapid inspiration and disarray. Pages and pages of notes accumulate, marked by their initial incoherence, an outpouring of ideas and impressions that, at first glance, resist easy organization. Here, writing is not a methodical endeavor undertaken with a carefully structured plan, but rather a spontaneous, almost instinctive act. The dynamic is raw: thoughts and feelings pour out quickly, unchecked, capturing fleeting moments of anxiety, confusion, or revelation. This chaos is a fertile ground for Yorke; within disjointed lines and half-formed concepts lie the seeds of artistic creation.

A significant source behind Yorke’s writing is the radio, omnipresent, relentless, impossible to escape. The repetition of news bulletins, broadcasting around the clock, confronts him constantly. Rather than passively receiving these updates, Yorke seems overwhelmed by their persistence and their weight. The world, filtered through the immediacy and urgency of radio news, breaks through to his everyday life, influencing his thoughts and, inevitably, his art. The selection of details, “most of it was taken from the radio,” hints at a fragmented reality where the steady hum of information interrupts personal space, dictating the pace and content of creative work.

Becoming a parent is portrayed as a sudden jolt. This new role sharpens his awareness, intensifies the impact that the external world has on him, and perhaps narrows the boundary between the personal and the global. The intrusion of constant radio news into daily existence takes on deeper significance: as a parent, the state of the world is no longer abstract or distant but pressed against the intimacy of home and family. The sense of responsibility, concern, or even dread creates an emotional current that is both directly personal and inescapably shaped by collective experience. In the swirl of incoherent notes lies the emotional lived reality of a person newly responsible for another life, navigating the information overload of the modern age.