Creativity Quote by Thom Yorke

There’s a particular kind of dread in the phrase “every hour of the day”: not dramatic catastrophe, just the steady drip of the world insisting on being heard. Yorke isn’t romanticizing inspiration here; he’s describing a defensive reflex. The speed - “quickly,” “pages and pages” - reads less like creative flow than like triage, as if writing is the only way to metabolize an overload of information that won’t politely wait for you to be ready.

The telling pivot is “suddenly being a parent.” Parenthood shrinks your usable bandwidth while raising the stakes of what you’re hearing. The radio becomes a relentless metronome for anxiety: headlines on repeat, danger and policy and disaster reduced to hourly punctuation. Yorke’s “incoherent at first” isn’t self-deprecation so much as an admission that coherence is a luxury. When you’re trying to absorb a new life at home and a noisy, unstable world outside it, the mind produces fragments.

“Taken from the radio” also hints at his method: sampling not just as a musical technique but as a way of documenting how media colonizes private space. The radio’s authority - the clean voice, the cadence of certainty - contrasts with his messy notes, and that tension is the point. He’s capturing the feeling of living inside a broadcast: your attention hijacked, your fear standardized, your sense of time chopped into hourly updates.

The intent, then, isn’t to report news but to show what news does to you, especially when you’ve got someone small and vulnerable depending on your ability to make sense of it.