Weekly Neil: Everybody's Alone
When I learn to be free I wonder if I'll miss the pain
You might know the story behind Radiohead’s “Lift.” The group, surging to creative and commercial power in the mid-1990s, spent a portion of the winter of ‘96 capturing demos for ultimately what became their third album, OK Computer, at Chipping Norton Studios in Oxfordshire. One of these songs essentially amounts to the greatest Britpop song ever recorded. It’s a wondrous and starry-eyed tune with a swelling chorus and frozen sugar-cube chords that seem to melt away as you hear them, leaving only sweetness. Naturally, the five Radiohead members unanimously agreed that it was great — and also that it didn’t belong on the album. They left it on the cutting-room floor.
That song is “Lift,” and it just might be the ultimate what-if in history of 20th-century pop music.
Why would they do this? How could they do this? Isn’t it every songwriter’s dream to create something so good and universal that it must be shared, affirming both their abilities and their chosen calling?
For Radiohead, the song simply didn’t work they way they wanted it to when they aimed to translate it from a live banger to a studio version. “We played it too much in a certain way that didn’t work in my opinion,” band leader Thom Yorke said in 2001, as captured by fan sites since then. “It didn’t feel right. So we need to approach it in a different way but at the time of OK Computer it was impossible to get into rearranging it because everyone had fixed ideas on what to play and we’d all just got into a habit we couldn’t break.”
This is an understandable conundrum. There’s no point in recording a studio take of a song that simply lacks of the juice of the live version. And you can’t always slot live versions of songs into studio tracklists (well, Neil can) or risk messing with the feel of the whole album. So, per Thom’s calculations, “Lift” was left off OK Computer because they wanted to capture something special that fit the needs of the larger work, and it simply didn’t happen.
That mundane answer might satisfy casual fans. But real (Radio)heads understand the power of “Lift.” Listen to this. May 1996, Landgraaf, Netherlands. Pinkpop Festival. Thom rocks the Heisenberg lab drip, Jonny Greenwood brings in synthesized strings to sell the drama, Ed O’Brien yells beautiful backup vowels and lead guitar lines, Colin Greenwood’s plucky bass lines reach out and grab you, and Phil Selway transforms from gentle drumming to gale force so gradually you barely even realize he’s controlling the emotionality of the entire performance.
Right, so, how does a band recreate that magic in the studio? They tried. It didn’t work out. But there’s also a fiendish element at play here: popularity. That is, Radiohead knew the song was good as hell and couldn’t made them the biggest band on the radio and they didn’t want that. How could they know such a thing? They found out from Alanis Morissette’s fans.
Around the time of that Pinkpop show, the band opened for Alanis on her Jagged Little Pill tour and worked the newly written “Lift” into their setlists. It was a huge hit with the crowd. So huge that it frightened them.
“Suddenly you’d see them get up and start grooving,” O’Brien recalled to BBC Radio 6 over a decade later. “It had this kind of infectiousness about it. It was a big, anthemic song. If that song had been on that album, it would have taken us to a different place, and we’d have probably sold a lot more records, if we’d done it right. Everyone was saying this.”
Maybe the pressure to harness that hype wore on them in the studio, too. That’s an easy theory to believe, but it’s an entirely other thing to experience this. This is, for me, the definitive “Lift,” and frankly one that completely captures everything that makes that Pinkpop version so special. (YouTube commenters love to point out similarities between this song and Coldplay’s “Yellow” and devise would-be timelines where Chris Martin ripped them off. My response? Chris Martin wishes he could pull off that guitar tone.)
The first time I heard that studio version of “Lift” I cried a little. It’s perfect, and I knew the backstory. I had absorbed the myth into my bloodstream and finally came face to face with it and I felt like Bill Paxton at the end of Titanic. They had the heart of the ocean. How could they just let it go?
Stories like these are why I love being (deep, guttural sigh) a music guy. Music itself is easy to fall in love with. I’ve loved Radiohead since I was 17 and will continue to love them for decades. Given that, it’s natural to want to dig deeper, reading about who made this stuff and how and why and when before eventually arriving at the dreaded what if.
What if “Lift” was Radiohead’s big chance at a pop crossover and they tossed it out because they were afraid? What if they became the biggest band in the world?
These are laughable hypotheticals because, well, OK Computer did just fine without it. It arguably benefited from not having a syrupy normcore single buoying it to begin with. (They’d already perfected those kinds of tunes anyway.) And OK Computer is regularly listed as one of the best, if not the best, album(s) of the ‘90s, largely because of how many risks it took, how much new ground it covered. “Lift” didn’t do either of those things. The band still released it after all, 10 years later, on the deluxe edition. But not that sparkling version — this sleepy one, which I also like, but I really love that you can almost hear their exhaustion on the tape. “Here, sure, fine. You can have it.”
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Apart from being devoted Neil fans — have you heard Thom cover “After The Gold Rush” or witnessed the “On The Beach” rendition which is even better and frankly more suited to Thom’s eerie and sad sensibilities? — Radiohead have endured the “what if X song did Y and Z happened” shit much like their idol before them. In Neil’s case, there are so many complex alternate timelines that it puts the Halloween film franchise to shame. Case in point: Homegrown and Hitchhiker and Chrome Dreams, all albums Neil initially shelved only to later rework material from them or eventually release them all wholesale decades later.
I’ve been thinking about a different Neil scenario lately, one that exists only in my dreams. We know that after putting out Harvest in early 1972, he spent some of the rest of the year getting even more famous, finding even more commercial success, and trying to wrap his head around going out on the biggest tour of his life so far. Where he ended up with his band, The Stray Gators (the guys he made Harvest with), was so far from what might be called the genteel rustic folk of that album that it’s been well covered, by me and others.
But what if, instead of the fraying tour document Time Fades Away in 1973, he’d put out solid studio versions of those tunes where he wasn’t angrily bashing them out onstage to prove that he wasn’t an old folkie? What if he’d let the raw anguish and desperation of that moment melt off a little and created a proper follow-up to Harvest, one that incorporated the songs he’d captured at the end of the previous year?
It would be called Everybody’s Alone, a spiritual sequel in name to his first real artistic achievement, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and it would preface his turn toward rockabilly and creative mischief in the ‘80s captured later on Everybody’s Rockin’. The tracklist for this mythical, imaginative EP would be largely comprised of stuff like “Sweet Joni,” “L.A.,” and an ode to his new baby boy, Zeke, and his partner, Carrie, called “New Mama.”
We don’t have to pretend too much because Everybody’s Alone is the name of a collection of unreleased and unfinished studio sessions of these very tracks. Neil put it out as part of an Archives series in 2020. It’s warm and sounds like the barn but louder. The cover is so good, just Neil caught in a half smile, walking in a flannel shirt facing the camera but clearly turning away, like he’s not particularly keen on being seen or lingering.
What’s missing from those sessions, though, is the track of the same name. “Everybody’s Alone” is simply a great goddamn title that I can see how he’d use it to name that time period when many of these songs were captured even if he didn’t have the song at his disposal. His friend and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten had just overdosed and died. His newfound commercial success was freaking him the hell out. He couldn’t have felt more alone, even in this wonderful period of domestic thriving.
“All I want you to know,” he sings near the end of the song, “is that I love you so much that I can hardly stand it. But everybody’s alone.”
It’s impossible not to read so clearly into Neil’s frame of mind during this time. But we know he did not, in fact, record this song during those sessions in late ‘72. Instead, he waited and laid it down with a new group, The Santa Monica Flyers, in the sessions that yielded Tonight’s The Night the next year. That version, to me, is definitive. It’s the studio “Lift” with Thom’s fuzzy guitar. There’s a simple reason for this, and it’s easily found by looking at some dates. It was captured on August 26, 1973, the same day the crew recorded the versions of “Tonight’s The Night,” “Speakin’ Out,” “World On A String,” “Mellow My Mind,” and “Tired Eyes” that appear on Tonight’s The Night — a.k.a. the bulk of the album. Magic in that room, man. What a night.
I try to envision a world where I hear this “Everybody’s Alone” on a distant store speaker the way I’d imagine hearing “Winterlong” and it simply doesn’t exist. It cannot exist. But what about an earlier version, one that dates back to 1969 to Neil’s Topanga Canyon days and is decidedly more psychedelic?
“Everybody’s Alone,” as recorded with Crazy Horse on August 4, 1969, scans as a less urgent B-side from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, though it’s markedly different from the version from four years later. The guitar lines are pure acid fuzz, to start, and the big dynamic changes seem to stem from the post-chorus opposed to the drama of the chorus itself. Instead of Ben Keith’s pedal steel we get big open chords that sound like all of the 1960s folk-rock personified. It sounds good, but the vibe is less sad and borderline despondent and more “aw shucks.” The weariness that comes with age simply had not arrived yet. Danny Whitten himself plays those guitar chords, which makes me sad to hear it, knowing Neil would revisit it after his death.
I’m not sure you’d hear this version in a supermarket either. But you might clock it in a cool record store or maybe even a cafe. And you’d know whoever has the vinyl or the aux cord knows enough to understand the immense vulnerability and wisdom Neil already had at 24 when he wrote:
People talking to me
Someone saying that I’m not the same
That’s so easy to be
But when I’m finally free
I wonder if I’ll miss the pain
’Cause everybody’s alone
Alternate histories are fun mind experiments because they do the same thing good art does: makes us forget that we are alone, or at least makes us feel seen in how alone we really are. Conor Oberst (who also does a mean Neil cover) once sang that “the sound of loneliness makes me happier.” What’s that one line from “Winterlong” again? “It’s all illusion anyway”… except it’s real if you feel it.
In another world maybe “Lift” topped the U.S. and U.K. charts and maybe Radiohead and Oasis co-headlined a Britpop global tour in 1998 that ended disastrously. Maybe they played “Everybody’s Alone” in the arena as folks filed in and waited for the show. Maybe someone even threw a rose on the stage and another one held up a peace sign for a photo.
Or maybe all that, even in the realm of fantasy, gets left on the cutting-room floor, too.
“Everybody’s Alone,” written by Neil Young, from Neil Young Archives Volume II: 1972–1976 (2020)
Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Ben Keith: pedal steel guitar, vocals
Nils Lofgren: piano, vocals
Billy Talbot: bass
Ralph Molina: drums, vocals