This issue is a love letter to The Bends (1995) by Radiohead.
When I first heard “Fake Plastic Trees”, I knew that I actually liked music. Prior to that, I’d listened to the show tunes endeared to my mother by her nostalgic memories of productions past and the only CD she had in the car, The Very Best of the Eagles (2003). I liked Eagles just fine, and, I reasoned, knowing the lyrics to “Hotel California” was the peak of my interest in popular music. I wanted to be a Broadway actress; anything involving a distorted guitar was of little interest to me.
But The Bends changed everything. It made me feel like I was a real person, rather than a ghost, floating around the purgatory of middle school. I was just coming into sixth grade when I discovered it, and my life was getting more complicated. My emotions felt outsized, like I was an overflowing cup, sloshing around and spilling my guts. I didn’t know where to channel the excess of energy I had at school, in my relationships, in my own head. I was developing the anxiety disorder that would follow me for the rest of my life, like a scrawny, yapping dog.
Although it was released in 1995, almost five years before I was born, I felt like Thom was looking at me, through me, when I saw the music video for “Fake Plastic Trees.” He’s in a blue-tinted grocery store, curled up like a child in a shopping cart. I’d never heard anyone so sad, so resigned and exhausted, as Thom when he sang,
If I could be who you wanted
All the time
It made me wonder if I was allowed to feel the way I did, desperate for emotional connection and understanding. Maybe fully grown adults felt as mixed-up as me. The more I heard—“The Bends”, “Black Star”, “High and Dry”—the more I felt vindicated in my burgeoning realization that life was kind of tough.
I keep falling over, I keep passing out
When I see a face like you
It’s no coincidence that this album resonated with me during the first stressful, tumultuous period of my life. Radiohead was under a lot of pressure when they made The Bends; after the huge success of “Creep”, the band knew fans only wanted them to replicate their hit. It was either deliver a the record people expected or lose the momentum of their flash fire fame.
Radiohead conjured a third option with the release of The Bends, an album whose every song surpassed those of Pablo Honey (1993) and subverted the commercially viable, try-hard sophomore record trope that so many bands fall into. It had extensive range, from the screaming guitar on “Just” to the whispered vocals on “Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was.” Thom’s emotional performances are a through-line of the record, tying together the anger and desperation and vulnerability. Fans didn’t get what they asked for; they got something better.
The Bends influenced Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Mumford & Sons, alt-J, and countless others. It didn’t do numbers initially, but received critical acclaim and major sales a year after its initial release. Musicians who would go on to become my generation’s favorite artists were teens, picking up their first guitars. In turn, those bands inspired the modern rock sounds on this playlist—the chimes on “Little Death”, the intentionally messy electric guitars in “Berlin Got Blurry”, and the poignant lyrics on “what lovers do.” The Bends was a landmark album. It changed a lot of lives, including mine.