Episode 17: Radiohead and the Sounds of Summer

Summer’s in full swing in the Northeast Ohio suburbs. The swimming pools are open, the lawn mowers are roaring, the recycling bins are overflowing with crushed cans of craft beer and Corona Seltzers. After our lost summer of 2020 – a blur of activity that began with house repairs in Boise and ended back East with a new home in Hudson – it’s been nice to breathe in the season a bit. Over the holiday weekend, we packed in a trip to Lakewood, a backyard fire and a big ol’ Fourth of July family cookout, and it felt like we spent more time with people than we did in three months last summer, people we couldn’t wait to reconnect with after moving but rarely saw as we waited out the winter and waited our turn for vaccinations. Two years ago, at the urging of my wife, Erica, I took that 16Personalities test and it identified me, fairly accurately, as 53% introvert / 47% extrovert. In many ways, the introvert in me relished the early stages of the pandemic, and I used that time to step back, sink inward and reset. But lately, especially after a work trip to Boise that doubled as an eight-day immersion in the post-protocol world, the extrovert in me has been itching to molt his stay-at-home skin and crawl out of the bog.

Our daughter, Magnolia, just turned 13, and she’s using some of her summer vacation time to learn how to sleep in, a skill as equally important to a newly-minted teenager as learning to live by the alarm. She wakes up most mornings somewhere between a smile and a scowl, leaning toward the latter, which is to say, she’s a lot like her father. I wouldn’t call it a bleak worldview, but the aviators I look through certainly aren’t rose-colored; I often describe myself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist but a disappointed realist. Most days Magnolia seems right there with me, which is to say, I should probably introduce her to Radiohead. But I’m not quite ready to put her through a full immersion. I’m holding onto that one for later, maybe when she’s 15 or so.

Magnolia was born into a musical family – a mother who can actually play music and dance to it, a father who can do neither but still found ways to glom onto his passion – and our kid was destined to love music or hate it. Thankfully, it’s the former. Two of Magnolia’s birthday gifts were concert tickets, and one of her Christmas presents last year was a Spotify account she didn’t have to share with a parent. It’s fascinating to see where the algorithms and influence of her friends take her. Naturally, with a life lived around music her parents’ tastes were going to seep in, but Magnolia found the Smiths on her own, and that alone was worth the 10 bucks a month. Magnolia’s playlists also include a surprising number of songs by the titans of 21st century Dad Rock – Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse, the Shins – as well as newer indie artists like Caamp, Girl in Red and Beach Bunny. She’s now looking up tour dates and telling us about bands she thinks we might like. We’re full circle at an age when I was still hiding cassettes so Mom and Dad couldn’t read the lyrics.

None of Magnolia’s playlists may qualify as pool party jams – though the Smiths’ “Ask Me,” with the line “Spending warm summer days indoors,” should count for something – but summer is what you make it, and that goes for the music, too. And while I love me some Led Zeppelin and Grateful Dead under the sun, my summer soundtrack leans toward the likes of Red House Painters and Tindersticks, though that has more to do with the fact my mild case of seasonal onset depression falls smack dab in the middle of the wet hot American summer. This state of mind certainly explains my relationship with Radiohead dating back to OK Computer and the summer of ’97. My best friend Andrew was the first to buy it: “Have you heard the new Radiohead?!” No. By 1997, the band was barely on my radar. Pablo Honey had come and gone, traded back to my local record store quicker than you can say “I don’t belong here.” I completely ignored The Bends (my bad). But then OK Computer. Summer. The Midwest. Hot. Humid. Stuck back home on my first long break since leaving for college the previous fall. What a weird exhale it was. Alternately comforting and discomforting. I was working two jobs: full-time grunt in a sweltering factory, part-time counter jockey in an air-conditioned shoe store. I was saving up for a used car. I didn’t sleep much. I scowled a lot. Ambition makes you look pretty ugly.


The Midwestern summer air is simultaneously static and stagnant. Crackling with energy, heavy with fatigue. It’s strange, disorienting and near-hallucinatory. Shuffling around on sticky suburban asphalt, sneering at the insistent sun overhead, Thom Yorke proved an ideal companion. It took a couple of listens for the album to sink in. I hadn’t heard anything like it and I wasn’t alone, because at that time there wasn’t anything like it. That’s hard to imagine now given how many bands heard OK Computer and tried to be Radiohead, but in 1997 – perhaps the first year to accurately be described as “post-grunge” – quote-unquote alternative rock occupied a goofy, transitional space. The next-Nirvana gold rush was over and the weirdo bona fides were retreating back to the underground; in their absence, we were sold Smash Mouth, Sugar Ray and “Semi-Charmed Life.” What airtime remained for videos on MTV was shifting toward nu-metal, boy bands and, briefly, electronica.

It was a big year for UK music, and not just abroad. Blur, Oasis and the Verve all had huge albums in the States, and the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin and uh, Chumbawamba also made waves that reached our shores. But none more than Radiohead. Much has been made of how prophetic OK Computer was in foretelling the emotional vacancy of our shiny modern life. Twenty-five years ago, the Information Age was a creeping come-on in the form of bulk-mail AOL trial discs whispering sweet nothings about a better world, a connected world – no walls, no borders, arms outstretched. The Internet was to teach the world to sing; meanwhile, OK Computer with its “pig in a cage on antibiotics” and Yorke warbling cautionary dystopian tales of total technological mind control. Did we heed its warning? Hardly. OK Computer is the soundtrack to our willful submission – no alarms, no surprises, please – an album for staring into the mirror in the morning, every morning, wondering what the hell we’ve done to ourselves and feeling powerless to do anything about it.

Then COVID. The pandemic has meant a lot of things to a lot of people – the good, the bad and the ugly – and one big positive has been seeing so many people take their power back, and all it took was getting out of the office. Remote work has given millions of people the space to work on themselves, and whether that work has involved mental, physical or spiritual health; strengthening or severing a relationship; accepting and expressing identity; or taking the chance on a change of scenery, there’s something uplifting and inspiring, even for a part-time cynic like me, about people finding everything in its right place in a world gone wrong.

This is my first Ohio summer in 21 years – the entire lifespan of my oldest nephew, Nate. It started to get humid off and on in late-May, right around the 20th anniversary of Radiohead’s Amnesiac, the companion album to Kid A, which was released seven months prior in October of 2000. Living in Boise, we missed the humidity. Some of our friends thought we were crazy, but when you live with something for so long, when you’re born into it, it’s easy to long for it when it’s suddenly absent from your life. Magnolia is feeling that way about the mountains – she misses seeing them every day, misses the comfort of knowing they’re there and available when she needs them, and I totally get it. The thing I missed most about humidity was jogging. The muggy air makes for great running weather, especially when it’s overcast, and one afternoon I even got rained on near the end and it was some kind of wonderful. When I got home, I put OK Computer on the turntable as the rain continued to fall outside. I had started thinking about the album on the run after the humidity against my skin and the pre-storm static in the air transported me back to the summer of ’97, and revisiting OK Computer that afternoon ultimately led me back to Kid A, because it always gets back to Kid A.

Kid A exists at the opposite end of the Radiohead spectrum, far away from the artful guitar squall of OK Computer, and even though its temperature is cooler – icy, even – it’s still a summer album to me. The fact the album cover alternately conveys despair and tranquility says a lot about the impact Kid A had on a generation of listeners who stepped into adulthood as they traded Alternative Nation for Prozac Nation. Yet Kid A remains the line in the sand for a lot of the band’s fans – or former fans – and it certainly confounded everyone, even the ardent disciples, upon its release. In every corner of cyberspace, someone could be found squawking about how Radiohead didn’t want to be a rock band anymore, but while all those critics and fans were busy grousing about the lack of big guitar anthems, Radiohead was redefining what a rock band could be just in time for the new millennium, and with Kid A, the Pink Floyd of the 21st century created another new template for modern rock. But to legions of deceived listeners, it sounded like five reluctant rock stars working hard to get people to stop liking them, and sure enough, Radiohead permanently alienated a segment of its audience that soon sought refuge in the arms of Muse. Still, Radiohead only seemed to get bigger, and in stranger and stranger ways. Standing amid a sea of people in a field in Montreal during the Kid A/Amnesiac tour, I experienced one of the weirdest, most transcendent and cathartic summer concerts I’ve ever attended under the stars, something like a rave for the disaffected, and it further cemented Radiohead’s place in my life. When I spent the next summer in Europe after quitting my first professional job 18 months into a career I wasn’t sure I wanted, Kid A accompanied me on spontaneous Eurorail adventures and sung me to sleep in hostel beds from Edinburgh to Amsterdam. Nearly two decades later, while traveling to Boise on my first plane ride in 20 months, as excitement, uncertainty and a slight unease circulated through me, I again turned to the sonic womb of Kid A as I flew over the awakening republic below.

Think about how much you wanted to do when you were young. Have you done it? Are you doing it? Do you still want to? Is it even important to you anymore, or have you moved on and/or talked yourself out of it at this point? It’s sad to watch people age before their time and drift away from the things they loved in their youth, then go back and try to capture a piece of who they were long after it got buried in the sand. It’s called a nostalgia trip for a reason, but the past can be a trap, and sometimes I fall into it as I shuffle around under the summer sun, longing for different latitudes from distant lifetimes and different definitions of freedom. In the finite moments of your life, sunlight hits your face in infinite directions, yet it’s all the same sun whether you’re trudging up a dirt path through the Scottish Highlands at 24 or jogging down an asphalt suburban street at 43. The song remains the same, and two decades later, Radiohead remains a shield against a world I sometimes reluctantly inhabit, in a season that sometimes sucks my life force – a way to disappear completely, to lose myself (even for a minute there), a reminder to look for the beauty in the cracks in the pavement.

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