"Everything in Its Right Place"
Song by Radiohead
from the album Kid A
Released2 October 2000
Genre
Length4:11
Label
Songwriter(s)Radiohead
Producer(s)
Audio sample
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"Everything in Its Right Place" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead, released on their fourth album, Kid A (2000). It features synthesiser and digitally manipulated vocals. The lyrics were inspired by the stress felt by the singer, Thom Yorke, while promoting Radiohead's album OK Computer (1997).

Yorke wrote "Everything in Its Right Place" on piano. Radiohead worked on it in a conventional band arrangement before transferring it to synthesiser, and described it as a breakthrough in the album recording. Though it alienated some listeners expecting rock music, "Everything in Its Right Place" was named one of the best songs of the decade by several publications.

Writing

Following the success of Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer, the songwriter, Thom Yorke, had a mental breakdown.[2] He suffered from writer's block and became disillusioned with rock music.[3] Instead, he listened almost exclusively to the electronic music of Warp artists such as Aphex Twin and Autechre, saying: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music."[2]

Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing his new grand piano.[4] "Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote,[4] followed by "Pyramid Song".[5] Yorke described himself as a "shit piano player", and took inspiration from a quote by Tom Waits saying that ignorance of instruments gives him inspiration. Yorke said: "That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant."[6] He would "endlessly" play the "Everything in its Right Place" melody, attempting to "meditate out of" his depression.[7]

Yorke denied that the lyrics were gibberish, and said they expressed the depression he experienced on the OK Computer tour. He cited a performance at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England, in 1997: "I came off at the end of that show sat in the dressing room and couldn't speak ... People were saying, 'You all right?' I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn't hear them ... I'd just so had enough. And I was bored with saying I'd had enough."[8] The line "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" references the sour-faced expression Yorke said he wore "for three years".[8] Yorke said the line was "pretty silly ... But I thought it was funny when I sang it. When I listened to it afterwards, it meant something else."[9]

Recording

A Prophet-5 synthesiser

According to the bassist, Colin Greenwood, Radiohead's producer, Nigel Godrich, was initially unimpressed by "Everything in its Right Place".[10] Radiohead worked on the song in a conventional band arrangement in Copenhagen and Paris, but without results.[11] One night, while they were working in Gloucestershire,[11] Yorke and Godrich transferred the song from piano to a Prophet-5 synthesiser.[12][10] Yorke hesitated to use the line "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon", but recorded it at Godrich's encouragement.[13] Godrich processed his vocals in Pro Tools using a scrubbing tool.[10] For live performances, Radiohead recreated the vocal effect by manipulating Yorke's vocals with Kaoss Pads.[14]

The lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, said the song was a turning point in the making of Kid A: "We knew it had to be the first song, and everything just followed after it."[10] He said it was the first time Radiohead had been happy to leave a song "sparse", instead of "layering on top of what's a very good song or a very good sound, and hiding it, camouflaging it in case it's not good enough".[10] The guitarist Ed O'Brien and the drummer, Philip Selway, said the track forced them to accept that not every song needed every band member to play on it. O'Brien recalled: "It forced the issue, immediately! And to be genuinely sort of delighted that you'd been working for six months on this record and something great has come out of it, and you haven't contributed to it, is a really liberating feeling."[11]

Composition

"Everything in its Right Place" is an electronic song featuring synthesiser and digitally manipulated vocals. ABC.net described it as "dissonant" and "ominous".[15] NME likened it to electronic music released on the record label Warp, with "minimalism and all manner of glitchy creepiness" and "weirdly hymnal dreamscape of ambient keys".[16] O'Brien observed that it lacked the crescendos typical of Radiohead's previous songs.[11]

The minimalist composer Steve Reich reinterpreted "Everything in Its Right Place" for his 2014 album Radio Rewrite. He noted the song's unusual harmonic movement: "It was originally in F minor, and it never comes down to the one chord, the F minor chord is never stated. So there's never a tonic, there's never a cadence in the normal sense." He also noted that the word "everything" follows the dominant and tonic: "The tonic and the dominant are the end of every Beethoven symphony, the end of everything in classical music ... I'm sure Thom did it intuitively, I'm sure he wasn't thinking about it ... but it's perfect, it is everything."[17]

Reception

"Everything in Its Right Place" alienated critics who had hoped for more of the rock music of Radiohead's previous albums. NME described it as "the moment where Radiohead finally left behind the limitations of being an alt rock band and embraced a whole wide world of weirdness".[16] In 2009, Pitchfork described the shock some fans experienced hearing it for the first time:[18]

What was this shit? If everything was really in its right place, where were the fucking guitars ... And whose crackling old keyboards were those? And why did rock's razor-sharp voice suddenly sound as if it'd been broken into bits by a centrifuge? ... "Everything in Its Right Place" – a sharp-tongued kiss-off that stood on the shoulders of different giants, like krautrock, Stockhausen, and Squarepusher – poured new possibilities into several previously hermetic circles. And it was too hypnotic to dare apologise.

Reviewing Kid A, the Guardian critic Alexis Petridis called "Everything in Its Right Place" a "messy and inconsequential doodle",[19] and the Melody Maker critic Mark Beaumont dismissed it as a "haphazard and pointless synth'n'laptop experiment".[20] Reviewing Kid A for the New Yorker, Nick Hornby described his disappointment in the song: "'Hey! I can handle experimentalism!' you think, but your confidence is immediately knocked flat by the lyrics."[21] NME described it as a "beautiful triumph of understatement" and a "pointed" opener.[22]

"Everything In Its Right Place" was named one of the best tracks of the decade by Rolling Stone,[23] NME[16] and Pitchfork.[18] In a 2020 piece for the Guardian, the journalist Jazz Monroe named it the 25th-best Radiohead track, writing: "Like David Byrne before him, Yorke had renounced his authorship to flirt with self-erasure, yielding to gorgeously sunlit synths."[24]

Personnel

Radiohead

Additional personnel

  • Nigel Godrich – production, engineering, mixing
  • Gerard Navarro – production assistance, additional engineering
  • Graeme Stewart – additional engineering

Certifications

Region CertificationCertified units/sales
Canada (Music Canada)[25] Gold 40,000‡

‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.

References

  1. ↑ "Inductee Insights: Radiohead". Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 16 December 2019. Retrieved 14 October 2022.
  2. 1 2 Zoric, Lauren (22 September 2000). "I think I'm meant to be dead ..." The Guardian. Retrieved 18 May 2007.
  3. ↑ Smith, Andrew (1 October 2000). "Sound and fury". The Observer. Retrieved 19 May 2007.
  4. 1 2 Naokes, Tim (12 February 2012). "Splitting atoms with Thom Yorke". Dazed. Retrieved 4 January 2019.
  5. ↑ Kent, Nick (June 2001). "Happy now?". Mojo. Archived from the original on 6 February 2012.
  6. ↑ Fricke, David (14 December 2000). "People of the Year: Thom Yorke of Radiohead". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
  7. ↑ "Radiohead's Thom Yorke recalls writer's block while working on Kid A". NME. 16 October 2021. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
  8. 1 2 Fricke, David (2 August 2001). "Radiohead: making music that matters". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 6 January 2019.
  9. ↑ Yamasaki, Yoichiro; Yamashita, Erica (December 2000). "I Don't Want To Be In A Rock Band Any More". Select. EMAP.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 Greenwood, Jonny; Greenwood, Colin (20 October 2000). "An interview with Jonny and Colin Greenwood". Morning Becomes Eclectic (Interview). Interviewed by Nic Harcourt. Los Angeles: KCRW.
  11. 1 2 3 4 O'Brien, Ed; Selway, Philip (25 September 2000). "Interview with Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway" (Interview). Interviewed by Paul Anderson. XFM.
  12. ↑ "The 14 synthesizers that shaped modern music". The Vinyl Factory. 4 March 2014. Retrieved 5 March 2018.
  13. ↑ Doherty, Niall (27 July 2022). "Lost in music: Nigel Godrich". The New Cue. Retrieved 27 July 2022.
  14. ↑ McNamee, David (9 March 2011). "Hey, what's that sound: Kaoss Pad". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 August 2018.
  15. ↑ Zwi, Adam (13 October 2014). "Steve Reich meets Radiohead with 'Radio Rewrite'". Radio National. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 5 December 2015.
  16. 1 2 3 "100 Best Songs Of The 00s". NME. 29 May 2012. Retrieved 6 January 2019.
  17. ↑ Petridis, Alexis (1 March 2013). "Steve Reich on Schoenberg, Coltrane and Radiohead". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 29 August 2016.
  18. 1 2 "The 200 Best Songs of the 2000s". Pitchfork. 21 August 2009. Retrieved 6 January 2019.
  19. ↑ Petridis, Alexis (1 July 2001). "CD of the week: Radiohead: Amnesiac". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 November 2018.
  20. ↑ Beaumont, Mark (11 October 2010). "Radiohead's Kid A: still not much cop". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  21. ↑ Hornby, Nick (30 October 2000). "Beyond the Pale". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 14 March 2015.
  22. ↑ "Radiohead: Kid A". NME. 23 December 2000. Archived from the original on 4 March 2020. Retrieved 4 May 2020.
  23. ↑ "100 Best Songs of the 2000s". Rolling Stone. 17 June 2011. Retrieved 16 June 2018.
  24. ↑ Monroe, Jazz (23 January 2020). "Radiohead's 40 greatest songs – ranked!". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 24 January 2020.
  25. ↑ "Canadian single certifications – Radiohead – Everything in Its Right Place". Music Canada. Retrieved 16 December 2022.
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