Sail to the Moon. (Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky.)

First of all, we need the correct lyric. In the Hail to the Thief liner notes, the lyrics are printed like so:

I sucked the moon I spoke Too soon And how much did it cost? I was dropped from Moonbeams And sailed On shooting stars Maybe you'll      be president But know      right from wrong Or in the flood you'll      build an Ark And sail us to the moon

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's try an figure out what the lyrics do. Starting with the title and the refrain, when imagining sailing to the moon, I can't help but think about sailing in the ocean early in the evening--nothing but possibility ahead--and the moon peaking up over the horizon, an optical illusion suggesting that you could actually sail there under the right circumstances. We've all let ourselves fall for these illusions from time to time, allowed our minds to momentarily free ourselves from the constrains of physical reality and just be joyfully overwhelmed by the infinite. It's never long before we again crave the restraints, but for on immeasurable moment no whimsy is impossible.

The first two lines of the song are interesting in that they are almost incoherent: "I sucked / the moon," which I don't take to be poor or lazy writing; rather, I think the almost haphazard word choice is reflective of the impossibility of articulating what's happening to you during moments of overwhelming awe. When it truly dawns on you how many stars are in the sky, or how vast the ocean is, or how close the moon feels, you can't contain that feeling with a number, or a word--that wouldn't accurately describe the realization. But, regardless, social creatures we are, we feel a need to articulate it, we want to be able to describe the experience to somebody, to make it real--a kind of pics-or-it-didn't-happen, but when we first try to do this, when we speak "too soon" words escape our mouths, but they make little sense: sailing to the moon, or the closeness of the moon, becomes sucking the moon, and we're not sure exactly why. Were this written in prose, it might become, "'I sucked the moon,' I spoke, too soon." The Romantics figured this out over two hundred years ago. In "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", Wordsworth couldn't describe the daffodils in the moment, he could only do so in retrospect. It's also noteworthy to mention that, musically, the rhythm section is absent from these early verses, sucked a lack of groundedness, a lack of tangibility.

"How much did / it cost?", the "it" of course being speaking too soon, suggests feeling of regret, almost apologetic guilt--but what for? Does the speaker feel guilty for trying to articulate the sensation of being awestruck (presumably to a world of skeptics), or is the guilt in response to allowing the self to become awestruck in the first place? We can't be sure, but regardless, we can assume that the speaker feels that the sensation of sailing to the moon would not be accepted by the status quo.

Over the next four lines, the speaker seems to be getting closer to describing what happened to him/her, which of course is emphasized by the added bass guitar, one half of Radiohead's rhythm section. The speaker feels s/he has was dropped by moonbeams, sailed on shooting stars, and we can imagine a whole list of whimsical, cosmic modes of travel felt by the speaker during this life-altering experience.

We get a musical break, a bit of a bridge, next, hinting that some time has gone by between the moon event and whatever happens next. And, with the drums rejoining the song, the rhythm section brings the tune back down to earth. A few things happen here. First, it's revealed that the song is actually written from the second person point-view, prompting us to wonder who might be hearing this tale. Some members of this forum have suggested the the the speaker is Thom Yorke and that he's speaking to his son, Noah, which is a fair inference given the flood reference later in the song. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of inserting large portions of the artist into the art, but, regardless, I agree that the language does suggest the words are intended for a young listener, a character who has a lot of time and possibility ahead of them. "Maybe you'll / be president / but know / right from wrong" are words we easily imagine a parent telling their child, a bedtime vote of confidence, a self-esteem boost for pleasant dreams. However, the fact that the lyrics were penned by an Englishman adds another, almost bitter, element of sarcasm, cynicism, to these encouragements, a far cry from the youthful awestruck wonder of the earlier moments of the song. Perhaps the speaker never did get to the moon after all? Perhaps the physical world kept them down.

For the final verse, we have the flood reference, a subtle plea to save "us" from the flood by sailing us to the moon, to do what the speaker could never achieve. Again, we have this push and pull happening, where the cynicism from the president remark still hangs in the air, yet memory of the moonbeams and sailing on shooting stars remains too. Both realities should not co-exist, but nonetheless they do exist together, just in the speakers mind. There's a bit of romantic irony going on here. When recalling the object, in this case the moon over the ocean, or overwhelming magnitude, the speaker becomes aware that the mind can imagine this magnitude, even though it could never be experienced in reality. I had a professor use infinite as an example of this, so I'm going to borrow it. You can never count to infinite, will never arrive there physically, so it therefore should not be cable to exist. Yet you can imagine it as magnitude, a concept, and so infinite can exist in the mind. So when we talk about infinite, we're really talking about our minds. Any overwhelming magnitude functions like this, with the ocean and space and the moon being no exceptions. The speaker describes these fairy tale-like travel possibilities, but is really learning that these possibilities, these magnitudes, have existed in their mind the whole time--it just took the experience to awaken this realization. 

As such, while the mood is cynical at times, the tone, to me, reads hopeful. I think the speaker really believes in small moments that one could actually sail to the moon,,even (or perhaps especially) if we're talking about an imaginary trip to the moon. Isn't there a quiet beauty in our only saviour only existing in the realm of the imaginary? It brings to mind my favourite line from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: "For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing." It's not the feather of the world, the breath of the world--no, it's the rock of the world that is founded securely on a fairy's wing, the rock, the most stable, core, physical thing, the truth of the earth, the centre of all that is real. I think Thom Yorke might say you could find the rock of the world by sailing to the moon. And, finally, the last musical elements of the song feature little piano triads, fading up into the treble, sailing away from us, growing fainter and fainter, until they can no longer be heard. Perhaps they make it where they're headed.