E major · Camelot 12B · 86 BPM
High and Dry
by Radiohead
- 86
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 42
- Danceability
- 7
- Acousticness
Thom Yorke first performed "High and Dry" with another band, Headless Chickens, while he was attending the University of Exeter in the late 1980s. He said the lyrics were about "some loony girl I was going out with", though they later became mixed up with ideas about success and failure. Radiohead recorded a demo of the song in 1993 at Courtyard Studios in Oxfordshire with their live engineer, Jim Warren, during the sessions for their first album, Pablo Honey. The band dismissed the demo as "too Rod Stewart" and set it aside.
The demo was later rediscovered and remastered for Radiohead's second album, The Bends, released in 1995. "High and Dry" came out as a double A-side single with "Planet Telex" on 27 February 1995 through Parlophone and Capitol Records. Two music videos were made for the song. The first, directed by David Mould, featured the band performing at the Vasquez Rocks outside Los Angeles, while Capitol commissioned a second version for the American market, set in a roadside diner and inspired by the 1994 film Pulp Fiction. Directed by Paul Cunningham, that video was edited at MTV's request to remove a shot of an exploding car.
Yorke later distanced himself from the track. In 2006 he called it "very bad" and said that EMI, Radiohead's record label at the time, had pressured him into releasing it.
High and Dry runs at 86 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.79 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 698 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.