Pyramid Song and Siddhartha
"They all became part of the river. It was the goal of all of them, yearning, desiring, suffering; and the river's voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire. The river flowed on towards to it's goal. Siddartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he had ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all the goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water changed to vapour and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew. But the yearning voice had altered. It still echoed sorrowfully, searchingly but other voices accompanied it, voices of pleasure and sorrow, good and evil voices, laughing and lamenting voices, hundreds of voices, thousands of voices............." Siddartha Herman Hesse
Malevolent, moving, epic, this sets the stage for the rest of Amnesiac. It has spooky piano chords, Thom Yorke singing beautifully, and strings that evoke being pulled into a vortex.
"'Pyramid Song' and 'Everything In Its Right Place' seem close?" Thom: "They were both written in the same week - the week I bought a piano (laughs). The chords I'm playing involve lots of black notes. You think you're being really clever playing them but they're really simple. For 'Everything' I programmed my piano playing into a lap-top, but 'Pyramid' sounded better untreated. 'Pyramid Song' is me being totally obsessed by a Charlie Mingus song called Freedom and I was just trying to duplicate that, really. Our first version of 'Pyramid' even had all the claps that you hear on Freedom. Unfortunately, our claps sounded really naff, so I quickly erased them."
Mojo, June 2001, Interview from April 12th 2001
Ed: "'Pyramid Song' is probably the best song that we've recorded. What happened was, Thom and Phil... Thom did the vocal and the piano, Phil played the drums at the same time. Did the take, that was great. Then strings were added, and it was pretty much finished then."
Colin: "The inception of the song was when we were in Copenhagen, and Thom went 'round the museum of culture. And there was an exhibition of Egyptian underworld and tomb art. Of people being ferried across the river of death, I don't know what it's called in Egyptian mythology, and he was very effected by it and he went back and sat behind the piano and wrote it. And we had like an amazing version of it on DAT, which was really beautiful, and that we wanted to work to, but it was on DAT, so we couldn't use it. And then we spent the next year trying to piece it together, basically. Six months."
( The song has a remarkably unusual rhythm; it’s even a point of debate among fans. One theory about it is that the song’s name is geometrically derived from the length of its notes, as illustrated below:
