Fake Plastic Trees
Radiohead
The Bends' emotional center, and the song where Yorke first sounds like an adult rather than a wounded kid. It moves in three tiers: an acoustic verse over Colin Greenwood's patient bass and a faint string pad, a swell of tremolo guitar, and finally an eruption of full-band distortion that arrives late and briefly, then withdraws. The lyric builds a world entirely out of artificial things — a fake plastic town, plastic surgery, a rubber plant, a woman who bought them all but can't stop wearing herself out — and the accumulation of fakery is a way of talking about exhaustion rather than consumerism alone. Yorke reportedly recorded the vocal in a couple of takes after an acoustic gig and wept afterward; you can hear the fray in his falsetto, the way the last "if I could be who you wanted" cracks and thins out rather than resolving. "It wears him out" repeats until the phrase becomes about the singer too. Written in 1994 amid the band's post-*Creep* alienation, it is a song about being loved for a version of yourself you can't sustain. Suited to the drive home from an event where you performed being fine for four hours, or to the specific tenderness of watching someone you love keep going on empty.
slow
1990s
frayed, tiered, worn
UK (England)
alternative rock, art rock. acoustic-to-electric ballad. exhausted, tender. Moves through patient acoustic verses to a brief cathartic eruption of distortion before withdrawing back into frayed exhaustion. energy 4. slow. danceability 2. valence 3. vocals: frayed falsetto, cracking, tender. production: acoustic guitar, patient bass, tremolo swell, brief full-band distortion. texture: frayed, tiered, worn. acousticness 6. era: 1990s. UK (England). The drive home after performing being fine for four hours, or watching someone you love keep going on empty.