Radiohead - OK Computer (opening trilogy setlist)

Today I’m featuring not a “song of the day” per se, but rather an album…one amazing album that takes me back to a certain place and time whenever I listen to it. I’m sure you know this album, who doesn’t? It’s a little collection of amazing songs by Radiohead from 1997 called “OK Computer”…and this is one of my favorite things to listen to in the whole wide world.

I’m linking to a setlist of the first three songs, “Airbag”, “Paranoid Android”, and “Subterranean Homesick Alien” as opposed to the whole album or just one song. I don’t know why, but something about these first three songs in order as an opening sequence or “trilogy” as I like to say is perfect and sums up the entire album. This is an album filled with soaring and sleepy guitars, dreamy computer blips and sparkles and keyboards, and general modern melodic fantasy, and these first three songs present that collection to a tee. Such texture. However, I still refuse to listen to track 7, “Fitter Happier”.

I first discovered “OK Computer” towards the end of high school with some of my “cool” friends. You know, the ones who go to all the parties and have awesome taste in music and who generally lift you up a peg in the eyes of the collective mass of kids around you. But they didn’t know about Radiohead yet, nor did I. We all knew of Radiohead, but none of us owned any of their music or had much prior knowledge aside from a pleasant passing acknowledgement of “Creep“, “High and Dry“, and that weird video for “Paranoid Android”. But, much to my friend Jared’s chagrin, I grabbed this album one afternoon and forced him up to the counter in the Walmart music department with it after fruitless hemming and hawing over what to do, something he always held over my head with contempt. Yeah, like it wasn’t one of the most awesome decisions we’ve ever made (and I’m terrible with decisions).

Thereafter, we played this nonstop as we drove around Clarksville, AR and hung out after school at the dam by Lake Ludwig, watching the water rise and fall and walking along the cement walls with a sense of comfort and escapism. This become our soundtrack, and it really had the magical power to transport us all to a better place, a more melodic universe where friendly aliens followed us on our journeys, and to somewhere I finally felt like belonged. I think that was it..it was the soundtrack to me growing up and slowly discovering who I was, that there really were people out there who could share and enjoy the same things that I did. And it felt so wonderful.

And it still feels wonderful, now at age 25, to put this album on and hear some of the most awesome sounds I could ever dream up….just technically this is an amazing, amazing creation (it’s easy to forget how awesome the actual instrumentation going on behind Thom’s voice really is..in fact, I may favor that element). Sure, I have the added bonus of the memories from high school, but even if those weren’t there I don’t know how I couldn’t be carried away from the eye-closing opening crunch of the guitars in “Airbag” while that other swirl of melody laces its way underneath as the drums kick in full-force to the most perfect series of outer-space inspired computer sparkles woven into every angle of “Subterranean Homesick Alien” (minute 1:20 = Brandi floats away). And then there is “Paranoid Android”…some of the best staccato and obscure guitar melodies I’ve ever heard and which melt me to a pulp. These are the sounds of my mind, of how I’m built, of how I think. It’s like hearing my thoughts and dreams fed back to me in a sensory whirlwind. Kind of like in Wuthering Heights, where Cathy confides that Heathcliff isn’t just important to her, he is her, a necessary part of being. That’s how this album is to me now, and I can’t imagine it not being at the top of my collection.

Tags: album of the day, guitar, ok computer, radiohead