“That shitty live version” is how Radiohead’s longtime producer, Nigel Godrich, referred to the band’s sole release of “True Love Waits” in an interview a few years back. He was speaking, of course, about the acoustic lament that closes out Radiohead’s 2001 live album I Might Be Wrong, adding, “We tried to record it countless times, but it never worked… To Thom's credit, he needs to feel a song has validation, that it has a reason to exist as a recording.” In the minds of many Radiohead fans (this one included), “True Love Waits” has always been entitled to a studio recording—not that we thought it was likely, after more than two decades of waiting. But just as some of their most emotionally revealing songs have ended past albums (Kid A’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” In Rainbows’ “Videotape”), Radiohead finally found the ideal home for one of their most vulnerable songs ever: to close out their most human album to date.

Gone are Yorke’s vehemently strummed chords, replaced by a duo of pianos that reinterpret the melody in a meandering, nearly polyrhythmic fashion. Whether purposeful or not, this new slowed-down, swirling direction speaks to our sense that an older, wiser man is singing “True Love Waits.” Perhaps he’s lost a little of his fight, or he knows now that the youthful plea that typically accompanies an earnest acoustic guitar line is not how one wins a battle of the heart with this much history. This doesn’t suggest that the song’s narrator means it any less; I almost believe him more now that he seems resigned to haunting the afterlife, eternally longing for the one who didn’t care to weather the storm together.

The lyrics to “True Love Waits” are among Radiohead's most quietly nuanced, filled with specific imagery (“crazy kitten smile,” “lollipops and crisps”) and Yorke's gender-skewing opening verse: “I'll drown my beliefs/To have your babies/I'll dress like your niece/And wash your swollen feet.” With this worshipful language, Yorke could be speaking to how pregnant women’s feet swell, or he could be nodding to Jesus’ anointing, after his feet are bathed by Mary Magdalene. The overall message here, however, is straightforward: You don’t throw true love away. You don't walk out. People who mean this much to each other wait it out, they fight. We should be grateful that Yorke did the same with “True Love Waits.”

[Listen to “True Love Waits” on Apple Music]