Ecriture d’un sample : 2000
Début du processus d’écriture : vers 2004-2005
Enregistrement : 2005-2006 ?
Sortie sur album : 11 juillet 2006 (The Eraser)
Utilisation sur la B.O. d’un film : fin 2006 (A Scanner Darkly, R.Linklater)
Remixes : novembre 2006 (Christian Vogel)
Sortie sur single des remixes : décembre 2007 (téléchargement) / janvier 2008 (vinyles)
Premier Live (en solo)  : 19 janvier 2009 (Latitude festival)
Premier live (avec Atoms for Peace) : 2 octobre 2009 (Echoplex)

Le cygne noir, de par sa rareté, s’est vu dédier un symbolisme complexe dans la littérature. Emmanuel Kant, puis Derrida lui ont accordé, de par sa couleur noir, signe d’invisibilité, l’image de l’amitié fusionnelle, totale. Celle-ci n’étant pas visible à l’oeil nu. Le libanais Nassim Taleb, philosophe des sciences, mathématicien et statisticien, applique la théorie du cygne noir aux grands événements de l’Histoire pour faire référence aux événements inattendus, statistiquement imprévisibles. Enfin, le terme de cygne noir est aussi utilisé dans la presse pour faire référence à une personnalité rare et hors du commun.
[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 2000[/button]

A l’époque de l’enregistrement de KID A, les 5 membres de radiohead produisent plein de nouveaux sons, des samples qui ne seront pas tous exploités dans les chansons de KID A et Amnesiac.

C’est un des bits, découpé dans un des samples d’Ed et Phil que Thom va conserver dans un coin de sa tête pour le réutiliser bien plus tard.

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / NME, 1er juin 2006″]”Black Swan” has this tiny, shredded segment of something that was one of the library samples we had. It was Ed and Phil doing this thing, and I sliced it into bits. The sample was 2000, but the song was 2005.[/quote]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 2004 – 2005[/button]

Quoiqu’il en soit vraiment, Thom déclarera plus tard que c’est “Black Swan”, venue à lui en dix minutes un peu par hasard, qui pourtant lui a donné l’impulsion pour un album solo.On était alors vers 2005, vers la fin de la période de promotion  d’Hail To The Thief

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / Paste, août 2006″]Black Swan’ was kind of an accident,” Yorke says. “I mean the whole idea for the record wasn’t, ‘Yes, we’re going to make an album now.’ When [producer] Nigel [Godrich] and I were talking about doing it, it was toward the end of the whole Hail to the Thief thing, and I’d been banging on about it for ages and figured it was about time we tried this out. We had lots of random laptop sketches that ii finally had the nerve to present to Nigel, and he was like ‘Eh, it’s OK.’ I knew I was going to see him again [in the studio] in another week so I was like ‘OK, next time around I’m going to blow his socks off’ … so, the first thing I did was ‘Black Swan’ and it took me all of 10 minutes. That said, a lot of this record was compiled by doing a huge, mammoth editing job, which Nigel is very good at, where you have a six-minute piece where the first five-plus minutes are really noisy—which, of course, I really like—and then Nigel hears the last 40 seconds and says, ‘I’m having that!’ But when you listen, ‘Black Swan’ is the key that opens up the rest of the record—once you ‘get it,’ all the other songs start falling into place. Because when we were putting this together, I deliberately wanted to do something that wasn’t too long, in order to sustain your focus, and—as you say—everything bounces off each other. I basically wanted it to work like [David Bowie’s] Hunky Dory, but with electronics.
[/quote]
 

Et au départ, Nigel n’est pas vraiment emballé par la partie électronique que Thom lui fait écouter. C’est la voix qui va le convaincre.

[quote cite=”Mojo, février 2008” ]Yorke himself clearly appreciated the experience. “Actually, I did learn something from it,” he says. “It made me realise that all the stuff I do on laptops gets me excited because I can hear what I’m gonna do vocally. But unless I have a vocal in place, it’s a bit unfair to expect anybody else to understand what the fuck’s going on.” For example? “I was playing bits of Black Swan, six minutes of, er, mostly drivel, and Nigel’s like, ‘Bloody hell! I’m not interested in any of this.’ I said, I’ve been working on this for ages. It’s great. ‘No it’s not,’ he says. But as soon as I put the vocal on, he was like, ‘OK, now it makes sense.’ It reminded me just how important the voice is.”[/quote]
Au moment d’enregistrer, se posera la question du “fuck”.  Le titre est pressenti comme un single, et ce gros mot au milieu des paroles pourrait être un frein au passage radio… Thom assume la vulgarité :

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / IFC ‘The Henry Rollins Show’, 29 juin 2006″]Black Swan’ was the single and they drop out the ‘fuck’ then. I think it’s funny. We did have quite a laugh for a couple of hours, me and Nigel, sort of putting trumpets in there and stuff. But you know, it’s like, well, that’s the song – “this is fucked up” – that’s the line, and you can’t change it. It’s the sort of hard off the cuff remark you make one night when you’ve had too much to drink and you’re talking to your friends about what’s going on, and you start off, “this is just fucked up”. It’s what everybody says, so hang on, why is it that suddenly when you’re playing it on the radio you can’t just say it? It doesn’t make sense to me. The taxi driver will say it to you! So why can’t I say it?[/quote]
Et tant qu’à faire, il n’a pas non plus envie de s’expliquer sur le sens des paroles.

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / Triple J ‘Top Shelf’, 22 août 2006″]Jane: “I guess I want to talk a little bit too about ‘Black Swan’, because that’s on rotation at Triple J at the moment, and the line ‘It’s all fucked up’!”

Thom: “Yeah. What do you wanna know?”

Jane: “‘Crushing people like biscuits’… Etcetera…”

Thom: “Wooh, that’s a difficult one to explain, erm… I can’t really explain that. I get away with it. (laughs)”

Jane: “What about ‘You cannot kick start a dead horse, you can just cross yourself and walk away’.”

Thom: “Yeah. You have to guess.”

Jane: “I have to guess?”

Thom: (laughs)

Jane: “You’re not making this easy for me, Thom!”

Thom: “No, I can’t, I can’t! I don’t wanna…. (sings) ‘I don’t wanna, I don’t think so.'”[/quote]
[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]2006[/button]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]11 juillet 2006[/button]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]2006[/button]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]28 novembre 2006[/button]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]décembre 2007[/button]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]janvier 2008[/button]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]19 janvier 2009[/button]

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’]2 octobre 2009[/button]