By the time Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser was released, I’d been a moderate Radiohead fan for 13 years, ever since the summer when you couldn’t pry the “Creep” cassingle out of my disaffected teenage hands. So, why did the reasonably popular debut solo effort from the lead singer of a band I dug quite a bit completely miss my attention initially? Who knows? Either way, I eventually found “The Eraser” and The Eraser, and I have Kanye West to thank for that. More on that when we get to “U”.

Last night, I was hanging out with my friends Jacob and Matt, who own a record label together. We were celebrating Jacob’s birthday with a couple of their artists and a friend of theirs who is trying to break into music via the portals of graphic design for merchandise. We were having a group conversation about how sometimes, and for some people, the mood of a song is more important than the lyrics. Me? I’m definitely a lyric guy. I think that, as a writer, words are the easiest way to get me to feel an emotion. There are some exceptions, though. I’m not quite sure what Thom Yorke is singing about in “The Eraser”. I don’t know exactly what Thom Yorke is singing about a lot of the time. But there’s something about the bleeps and bloops of “The Eraser”, Thom’s scary/eerie falsetto and the line “the more you try to erase me, the more I appear” that hits me right in the gut. Big mood, as the kids say these days (I think). Or more like, weird, haunting mood.