| "True Love Waits" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Radiohead | |
| from the album A Moon Shaped Pool | |
| Released | 8 May 2016 |
| Genre | |
| Length | 4:43 |
| Label | XL |
| Songwriter(s) | Radiohead |
| Producer(s) | Nigel Godrich |
"True Love Waits" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead. Radiohead worked on it for over two decades before releasing it on their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool (2016).
Radiohead first performed "True Love Waits" in 1995, with the singer, Thom Yorke, on acoustic guitar. Yorke performed it solo on guitar or Rhodes piano several times in the following years, and it became one of Radiohead's best-known unreleased songs. A performance was released on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings (2001).
Radiohead and their producer, Nigel Godrich, attempted to record "True Love Waits" several times, experimenting with different styles, but could not settle on an arrangement. Some of these versions were released on the compilations MiniDiscs [Hacked] (2019) and Kid A Mnesia (2021). One version became the foundation of another track, "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", on Radiohead's 2001 album Amnesiac.[1]
In 2016, Radiohead released "True Love Waits" as the closing track on A Moon Shaped Pool, rearranged as a minimal piano ballad. It received positive reviews, with critics naming it among the greatest Radiohead songs, and Pitchfork named it among the greatest songs of the decade. Several critics felt the long wait made the studio version more powerful. Though it was not released as a single, "True Love Waits" entered the French SNEP and US Billboard Hot Rock Songs singles charts.