u/Easy-Positive-1932

I want you to take a look at how he sings this verse in let down any live performance before 2004:

(Example: Hammerstein Ballroom 1997)

"Let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug in the ground"

He sings it with way more breath, in the "around" part his voice flawlessly keeps the "-ou" and stretches it. This is his open, airy, belted type of voice during the OK computer tours.

But however lets look at another recording, years later:

Wolverhampton Civic Hall 2006

this is the last recording of let down before it was excluded in the setlists, and later returning in 2016, and it highlighted alot about the change in thom's voice.

If you focus at the same verse again in his vocal performance:

"Let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug in the ground"

This time he sings in with a more constricted voice in "around", like pulling the vowels back into his throat: "aro-oand", at the same verse in different parts of the song you can see he tries to execute the same stretch he tried to do back then, but he cant get there quite a bit.

And when let down returned, it was apparent, thom did a full transition on how he sings that verse of the song.

This was all led by one performance that did lasting damage to thom's voice, in one of their lives at coachella, 2004. Thom was advised by his doctor to stop performing right before the performance as it could actually break his vocal chords and do lasting damage, thom didin't listen and still performed anyway, with 20 songs on the setlist.

Right after the performance the damage to yorke's throat was so bad that he couldn't even make a single sound, and it took weeks (or months) of recovery for him to speak and sing again.

This led him to this type of singing, that became a hallmark in In rainbows.