Caroline Polachek – True Love Waits
Closing out Monday is Ian, bringing us the spiritual opposite of “Slut Me Out 3″…

[Video]
[5.36]
Ian Mathers: For better and worse, getting obsessed with Radiohead when I was 16 was the beginning of a path that led directly from being a kid who liked listening to the radio in the car to being the adult who writes these blurbs and my other stuff. They’re still one of the only bands where I ever amassed unreleased and hard-to-find material for my own listening/compiling, a series of increasingly refined CD-Rs of the best Japanese bonus tracks, live rips, import tracks, alternate versions, etc. Younger me had been waiting since about 1996 for “True Love Waits” to “properly” come out — specifically, a version taking after the one with the whirling keyboard backing that is clearly never going to exist except for bootleg MP3s. Despite Radiohead being a lot less central to my listening and heart than they were back then (although The King of Limbs is actually great, and I will get mildly bruised on that hill), it still hit me in the gut when they finally put a studio version on A Moon Shaped Pool. Thinking through some of the possible personal implications of that choice makes my eyes roll back in my head if I don’t catch myself in time. Caroline Polachek, meanwhile, is one of my favourite singers of the past whatever years, one the Jukebox introduced me to (ignore my blurb, that song is a [10] and I didn’t know what I was talking about). I love her songwriting and other artistic choices, but her voice and how she uses it is a marvel to me. So I’m not sure why she decided to personally attack me, specifically, at Art Basel by taking the only song that I have an anecdote about that is so personally mortifying I will never put it on the internet and singing the motherfucking hell out of it. Even the backing track hits me harder than any of the Radiohead versions. Thom Yorke found dead in a ditch, and 19-year-old-me is right next to him.
[10]
Leah Isobel: Caroline has one of the most expressive voices of any pop singer currently working. And she will not let you forget it.
[3]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Extremely funny that one of the Berggruen brothers is proposing philosophical restructurings of our understanding of planetary governance while the other is commissioning pretty good Caroline Polachek covers of Radiohead deep cuts.
[7]
Tim de Reuse: I’m a Radiohead contrarian and not, for most purposes, a fan. Still, I always liked “True Love Waits” as one of the uncommon moments where the band’s veils of styrofoam atmospheres and bleak grandiosity part to let out a genuine whimper. In its minimalism it is deeply pathetic. It strips the narrator of all dignity; to sing it convincingly you have to be a freak. It works at the end of A Moon Shaped Pool because it’s the only thing on that album willing to show any restraint, and it works when Thom Yorke performs it live because it’s got imperfections and vocal strain and the sound of a crowd cooing along (and because, well, Yorke is a strange little guy). But Polachek’s no freak. Her performance here is technically immaculate and totally without edges. The fluttering electronics communicate not desperation but managed NPR-weirdness, an art-pop sophistication that reads as nonsensical against the narrative’s death march. That last high interval she hits singing “don’t leave” is gorgeous in isolation, but it’s a grandiose flourish in a song about lowering yourself: an act of fan-worship towards the legend of the song itself. At no point does she make me believe that she would burn her beliefs.
[2]
Alfred Soto: Good on her for covering a song beloved by the cognoscenti; but when I seek passionate restraint Caroline Polachek is not my first or tenth choice. Leave this approach to Cassandra Jenkins or, yeah, Thom Yorke. She should’ve treated her voice like a blowtorch and “True Love Waits” like a ship’s hull.
[6]
Frank Kogan: Balancing melody and chill. She should’ve let the chill win.
[4]
John S. Quinn-Puerta: I have always been a sucker for Radiohead covers. Punch Brothers’ “Kid A” cover played at my wedding. But what makes a Radiohead cover interesting to me is how an artist makes it theirs; there are many, many “Weird Fishes” covers, but only a few are truly excellent. I don’t think that Polachek reaches that level here, because I don’t hear anything particularly new. It’s pretty, yes, and I probably would have gotten chills if I had been there to see it. But I wasn’t there. I can’t experience this one as it was meant to be, because I don’t have that Walter Benjamin aura emanating from Water Lilies to accompany it. Yet it remains lovely.
[7]
Katherine St. Asaph: The vertical phone video panning around a large Monet confused me until I saw that this cover came from Polachek’s performance at Art Basel Paris. The rest of my blurb is going to be unfair — not least because everything I am about to describe also applies to the many music festivals she has played. But as someone who has been to the Miami edition (amid booth-sitting at another fair, which I swear is DIFFERENT trust me bro lmao sigh), I cannot hear Polachek’s admittedly plaintive performance without mentally swiveling the camera around to the presumptive crowd. (The actual crowd seems receptive enough; this is your second warning of uncharitability.) Dig, if you will, a picture of roving hypebeasts and half-interested, dubiously influential influencers in their Shein best, nursing $34 margaritas with purple gin — which they are nevertheless tipsy off because their only lunch was an immersive paint-n-sip brunch and a $17 “innovative food concept” (hummus) — having milled toward the Polachek dome as a cute break from posing at the satellite events with painted Van Gogh/Elon Musk mashups and Lisa Frankesque glitter-plexi assemblages and probably something AI something, and soon to mill away mid-song to Uber through 3-hour traffic en route to a Diplo concert or — I cannot emphasize enough that this is the real name of an actual event — the Corporate Disco party. Takes something away from it, you know? But —- unfairness over —- not everything.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: This should reduce me to a desperate, sobbing mess on the floor. I just feel a great emptiness, a despair that I have hollowed myself out until I can no longer sustain myself. I look up at the cloudy sky and wonder how much longer they will protect us from the rising heat that comes from the sun, so far, far away yet so powerful that our refusal to live according to our means has turned its generosity to overindulgence, our small, infinitesmal problems so loud the rest of the planet turning to ash below our feet no longer registers. Just don’t leave us. Please, don’t leave us behind.
[7]
Jel Bugle: Is it okay to say that this really isn’t my thing? Earnest singing over glitchy noise; perhaps there is a pretty nothingness to it? Perhaps there is an emotional resonance, and it makes people feel? To be honest, I’m a blunt object, and I’m more likely to feel the emotion in Meat Loaf than this kind of song.
[3]
Brad Shoup: “True Love Waits” was my lore dividing line—like “Yellow Ledbetter,” I couldn’t pretend to care about the meandering path the song took on its way to never being good enough for an album. (It didn’t help that I already associated the title with an evangelical purity movement.) I was never surprised that Radiohead couldn’t home the song: the chords were nice, but the lyrical mortification (I’ll dress like your niece/And wash your swollen feet) read like placeholder abasement, the kind of unfocused prostration that even Jeff Mangum would exorcise on the demo. They tried landing it as a synthrock power ballad, a trip-hop daygreeter, a Cure tribute. Amazingly, it was a song they couldn’t age out of, only into. When the band finally committed “True Love Waits” to A Moon Shaped Pool, they didn’t rephrase any sentiments or hide them in fog. They voiced them in the background ache of middle-age. Thom Yorke’s glassy tenor turns his weird old pledges (I’ll drown my beliefs/To have your babies) into frozen memories; the nagging, curled right-hand piano ostinatos are like desparate raps against the ice. Polachek is at the age where Yorke aged from gnomic provocateur into a full-blown grown ‘n’ sexy crisis. (I was, demographically, into Radiohead the appropriate amount until I heard 2007’s “House of Cards,” possibly the hottest and loneliest adultery song ever recorded.) But her gallery performance of “True Love Waits” treats it like a fragile gift: the vocal is played straight against a backmasked easy-listening keyboard exploration. She’s got the confidence to sing through the lollipops and crisps, but she took it for granted that she ought to.
[3]
In the middle of listening to this song, I forgot I was listening to it.
I think this being a cover works against it since you have all the Radiohead variations they did of it to compare it to. And I agree her vocals are too perfect for it but I love the flourishes she adds at the end that are something new to the song.
this is the bitchiest blurb I have written for this site (I have been informed that the paris one is maybe not as bad actually, although, also, source trust me bro)