Hail To The Thief - Lyrics and Themes

Lyrics and Themes

Hail to the Thief's lyrics were influenced by Yorke's unease about what he called the "rise of the right" and the "general sense of ignorance and intolerance and panic and stupidity" around the turn of the millennium. He told David Fricke of Rolling Stone: "When I started writing these new songs, I was listening to a lot of political programs on BBC Radio 4. I found myself – during that mad caffeine rush in the morning, as I was in the kitchen giving my son his breakfast – writing down little nonsense phrases, those Orwellian euphemisms that are so fond of. They became the background of the record. The emotional context of those words had been taken away. What I was doing was stealing it back." He denied any intent to make a "political statement" with the songs, and told the Toronto Star: "I desperately tried not to write anything political, anything expressing the deep, profound terror I'm living with day to day. But it's just fucking there, and eventually you have to give it up and let it happen."

Yorke, at the time the father of a young son, adopted a strategy of "distilling" the political themes into "childlike simplicity". He took phrases from fairy tales and children's literature and television he shared with his son, including the British 1970s series Bagpuss, whose creator Oliver Postgate is thanked in the liner notes. Having children made Yorke concerned about the condition of the world and how it could affect the lives of future generations. Jonny Greenwood felt Yorke's lyrics conveyed "confusion and escape, like 'I'm going to stay at home and look after the people I care about, buy a month’s supply of food.'"

Yorke has described Hail to the Thief variously as being about "a general fear of the future, that it's being jeopardised, that it's difficult to do very much about, because things have been set in motion that seem unstoppable"; "frustration and powerlessness and anger, and the huge gap between the people that put themselves in control and the people that allegedly voted for them"; and "the conflict between being incredibly angry and being so tired you just want to give up."