page_title: Amnesiac (album)
section_title: Music and lyrics
hierarchical_section_title: Amnesiac (album) / Music and lyrics
caption_attribution_description: Les Ondes Martenot are an electronic music instrument invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot.
context_page_description: Amnesiac is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released in June 2001 by Parlophone. It was recorded with producer Nigel Godrich in the same sessions as Radiohead's previous album Kid A; Radiohead released the work across two albums as they felt it would be too dense for a double album. As with Kid A, Amnesiac incorporates similar influences of electronic music, 20th-century classical music, jazz and krautrock. The final track, "Life in a Glasshouse", is a collaboration with the Humphrey Lyttelton Band.
  After having released no singles for Kid A, Radiohead promoted Amnesiac with the singles "Pyramid Song" and "Knives Out", accompanied by music videos. It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number two on the US Billboard 200. By October 2008, it had sold over 900,000 copies worldwide. It is certified platinum in Canada and the US.
  Though it disappointed some hoping for a return to Radiohead's earlier rock sound, Amnesiac received mainly positive reviews and was named one of the year's best albums by numerous publications. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize and several Grammy Awards, winning for Best Recording Package for the special edition.
context_section_description: Amnesiac incorporates experimental rock, electronica, and alternative rock. Colin Greenwood said it had "more traditional Radiohead-type songs together with more experimental, non-lyrical based instrumental-type stuff as well".  
  The first track, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", is an electronic song built from loops. "Pyramid Song" was inspired by the Charles Mingus song "Freedom", with lyrics inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while the band was recording in Copenhagen and ideas of cyclical time discussed by Stephen Hawking and Buddhism. 
  Yorke said "You and Whose Army?" was "about someone who is elected into power by people and who then blatantly betrays them – just like Blair did". "I Might Be Wrong" combines a "venomous" guitar riff with a "trance-like metallic beat". Colin Greenwood's bassline was inspired by Chic bassist Bernard Edwards. The lyric "never look back" came from advice given to Yorke by his partner, Rachel Owen: "Be proud of what you've done. Don't look back and just carry on like nothing's happened. Just let the bad stuff go." "Knives Out", described as the album's most conventional song, features "drifting" guitar lines, "driving" percussion, a "wandering" bassline, "haunting" vocals and "eerie" lyrics. 
  "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" is an alternative version of "Morning Bell" from Kid A. O'Brien said that Radiohead often record and abandon different versions of songs, but that this version was "strong enough to bear hearing again". Yorke wrote that it was included "because it came from such a different place ... Because we only found it again by accident after having forgotten about it. Because it sounds like a recurring dream. It felt right." Yorke said the lyrics for "Dollars and Cents" were "gibberish", but were inspired by the notion that "people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive".
  "Hunting Bears" is a short instrumental on electric guitar and synthesiser. "Life in a Glasshouse" features the Humphrey Lyttelton Band playing in the style of a New Orleans jazz funeral. According to Lyttelton, the song starts with "ad-libbed, bluesy, minor-key meandering, then it gradually gets so that we're sort of playing real wild, primitive, New Orleans blues stuff". The lyrics were inspired by a news story Yorke read of a celebrity's wife so harassed by paparazzi that she papered her house windows with their photographs.
caption: Jonny Greenwood used the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. Its resonating palme diffuseur loudspeaker (pictured centre) was used to treat the vocals on "You and Whose Army?".
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