"I Will" performed live by Thom Yorke on Musique Plus, Montreal, June 2, 2003.

"I Will" is a song which has been kicking around in the Radiohead catalog for a few years. Fans were first introduced to this song in the Radiohead tour documentary Meeting People Is Easy in 1998. In 2001, the song was reversed and transformed into "Like Spinning Plates" for the Amnesiac album (if you take "Like Spinning Plates" and play it backwards, you get something that sounds like "I Will"). Because of this, it appeared that "I Will" was lost and would never be released, but a studio version was recorded for Hail to the Thief in 2003.

The main inspiration for the song seems to be an incident from the first Gulf War. On February 13, 1991 the US military bombed the Amiriyah bomb shelter, at the time a refuge for over 400 people, nearly all women and children. All of them were killed by two precisely directed bombs, resulting in horrific imprints on the walls. When Thom heard about it, the event deeply disturbed him.

Thom: "I had an extremely unhealthy obsession, that ran through the Kid A thing, about the first Gulf War. When they started it up they did that lovely thing of putting the camera on the end of the missile, and you got to see the wonders of modern military technology blow up this bunker. And then sometime afterwards in the back pages it was announced that that bunker was not full of weapons at all, but women and children. And it was actually a bomb shelter. And so everybody...we all got to witness the wonders of modern technology. And it ran through so much stuff for so long for me. I just could not get it out of my head. It was so sick. And so that's where the anger comes from." (XFM interview, spring 2003)

"As a song it's sort of like a love song, but it's also sort of the angriest thing I've ever written as well. That sort of anger, that you can't even begin to express. This thing about 'you can do anything you want to me, but if you come after my family I will kill you.' You know, that sort of thing, which everyone has in them, I think." (official Hail to the Thief interview CD, April 2003)

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