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High and Dry
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.


Song lyrics of High and Dry 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

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