Song
High and Dry
Radiohead
Album:
The Bends
Song meaning of High and Dry by Radiohead, and what it is about
Thom Yorke, the songwriter for Radiohead, played a draft of "High and Dry" with Headless Chickens when he was a student at the University of Exeter in the late 1980s. "Some crazy girl I was going out with" was the subject of the lyrics, he claimed, but they later got "mixed up with ideas about success and failure."
Jim Warren, Radiohead's live engineer, recorded a demo version of the song at Courtyard Studios in Oxfordshire in 1993. It was written off as "too Rod Stewart" by them. For use on their second album, The Bends (1995), the recording was unearthed and remastered. In 2006, Yorke claimed that the song was "very bad" and that EMI, Radiohead's record label at the time, had forced him to release it.
High and Dry lyrics by Radiohead
Two jumps in a week, I bet you
Think that's pretty clever, don't you, boy
Flying on your motorcycle
Watching all the ground beneath you drop
You'd kill yourself for recognition
Kill yourself to never, ever stop
You broke another mirror
You're turning into something you are not
Don't leave me high
Don't leave me dry
Don't leave me high
Don't leave me dry
Drying up in conversation
You will be the one who cannot talk
All your insides fall to pieces
You just sit there wishing you could still make love
They're the ones who'll hate you
When you think you've got the world all sussed out
They're the ones who'll spit at you
You will be the one screaming out
Don't leave me high
Don't leave me dry
Don't leave me high
Don't leave me dry
Oh, it's the best thing that you've ever had
The best thing that you've ever, ever had
It's the best thing that you've ever had
The best thing you've had has gone away
So don't leave me high
Don't leave me dry
Don't leave me high
Don't leave me dry
Don't leave me high
Don't leave me high
Don't leave me dry
Release Date
1995
Songwriter/s
Radiohead
Producer/s
Radiohead, John Leckie, Jim Warren
Label/s
Parlophone, Capitol
