In the Faust Arp entry I am putting together for anibooms radiohead contest I dont want to directly reference the albums title by riddling the imagery with predictable rainbow colours; music videos are made for songs not for whole albums (usually … ) However, I do want to stay connected with the themes of the album as a whole and somehow draw on its unity. These are a handful of interesting comments and quotes that I have picked up about the album itself that I hope to try and absorb into my thinking (no references sorry):
… I started focusing on the words In Rainbows. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to go with the idea of trying to reach something you can’t. It’s there but you can’t reach it.
To the best of my knowledge the album took its In Rainbows title from a lyric on Reckoner (probably the best track on the album which dovetails in man ways with Faust Arp). Rainbows are illusory. The album deals a lot with dreams and hopes / expectations. Things going from being very vivid to little more than figments of imagination. There is something of the desire to get somewhere you are not. Many of the lyrics resist a definitive interpretation and conclusion there yet there is some degree of demand for judgement, acknowledgement. More specifically for this project I make a connection with a line from the opening of Book II from Goethe’s Faust:
Life is not light but the refracted color.
This can be read many ways but one interpretation seems to suggest that life and human nature is not pure and focussed but mixed and inconclusive, like rainbows. This idea is reflected more in Thom’s discussion of how he was trying to approach the album as a whole:
… wrote this album from a very harmonious thought. I didn’t want to fight anything, but at the same time I didn’t want to be apathetic. That kind of mood. The others caught up on it as well–that it was a personal record, or at least a human one. It felt good not to attack in any way for once. I didn’t want to judge everything, just sing like how I am, like what I’m feeling. Cause I felt like they were sort of, they were universal, there wasn’t a political agenda, it was being human, you know, there’s a lot of humanity in them.
I think I leave this here and look in the next post at these ideas of interpretation and meaning. I have added another image here retrospectively. Its development might make more sense after the following posts. ;o)
