A day before Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard’s Tall Tales arrives, the duo has shared “The Spirit,” an uncharacteristically upbeat (and difficult-to-record) track from the collaborative album out Friday.
As Pritchard told Rolling Stone, much of Tall Tales was written over email as the electronic music artist and Radiohead singer exchanged song ideas and tailored tracks. This method, however, proved tricky when it was to “The Spirit,” which Pritchard said was “one of the hardest ones” to complete.
“I wrote it, it was faster and it had drums in it. And [Yorke] tried singing it, he said, and he’d take the drums out. Because the drums I had in it were an old-school drum machine, but doing a Latin preset kind of thing going on. And they were taking up a lot of room. So he just said, ‘Let’s take them out, but we’ll have to find a new way to put rhythm in,’” Pritchard told Rolling Stone.
“[Yorke] put a guide drum in to sing to it, a basic kick and snare drum. And then he sang it to the guide drums and I was like, I need to replace these drums. But I couldn’t find… I mean drums is one of my favorite things to do and I couldn’t hear anything on it. Tried a couple of things and then I just made the decision: I’m not going to put drums on it. But I needed to then find a way of how I was going to get this to work as a song.”
Pritchard continued, “So my friend who’s in the building where I’m working who’s a bass player, I got him to play bass on it. I got him to play a very simple bass part because bass can be a little bit percussive and it’s a good starting point. And then I just put on some percussion. I’ve got a [physical] drum kit, so I just pedaled the hi-hat now and again, then laid electronic snare and some electronic hi-hats in. Just kept adding to it and seeing whether I could get this to work. Because it had something special and I needed to leave space for the vocal performance. It’s all about his delivery of that vocal. And then he still wasn’t happy with the vocal, so he changed it to first-person perspective. So it’s like, ‘I am not the fool.’ And then just got the right balance of performance on the song.”
Adding to the track’s difficult gestation is the fact that the song is uplifting, which — as fans of Radiohead and Pritchard know — isn’t the norm for either artist.
“It’s unusual for me to write in a major key. It’s so basic. We usually go for sadder, minor chords or stranger things, but I guess every now and again, you just need to do something that you don’t normally do,” Pritchard said. “So I did that and I assumed he’s just going to sing minor over major and it’s going to make it sadder. And when he sent me the demo, he’d gone with the chords. And I was like, ‘He needs to go sadder on this, not go with the chords.’ And then I tried to add some stuff to it to almost steer it. And then he emailed me and just said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, get rid of all of that.’ He was just like, ‘This is going to be really difficult to get to work. But if we can get this to work, it’s going to be a really strong, interesting track for the album.’”
Yorke and Pritchard previously shared the singles, “Back in the Game,” “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice,” and “Gangsters” from Tall Tales, out Friday. Tonight, May 8, a feature-length film comprised of artist Jonathan Zawada’s album-length visuals will screen in theaters; check the Tall Tales site for participating theaters.
