I bought a piano after “OK Computer,” at a time when picking up a guitar just didn’t do anything for me at all… part of songwriting is having that naïve excitement about not quite realizing why you’re getting off on it, because you haven’t had time to pull it apart yet. I don’t know many chords, and what I do know is from guitar playing-to approach playing piano after playing guitar is quite peculiar… I used to write songs on the piano, but then I didn’t have access to a piano. I just find it really nice, because things can pull and push against it. I’ve got one trick and that’s it, and I’m really going to have to learn a new one. You hold a single tone and skate from one chord to another unexpectedly.”

Interviewer: “There’s something very particular about the chords of your songs. Here’s a 2001 The New Yorker interview with Thom discussing the idea: Pedal notes help to tie different chord sounds together, and can make otherwise unrelated chords sound like they belong together. In both cases, the pedal note is the root note, but in practice it can be any note that fits all the chords in the progression.

In Pyramid Song, each chord has an F# note on top of the chord. In the Everything in its Right Place example above, the chords are all voiced so that the note C is the top note of every chord. This is a straightforward technique for voicing chords – a pedal note (or pedal point) is a sustained note held through changing harmony. Another technique that Radiohead use in their chord progressions is pedal notes. Radiohead broke onto the scene with the hit single Creep in 1993, and followed it up with Pablo Honey, The Bends and OK Computer, all of which.

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