Paranoid Android

The story behind

What makes Paranoid Android so special is its structure, which feels like several songs joined into one. Imagine taking three distinct musical ideas and putting them together in a way that, while seemingly chaotic, ends up making its own sense. It's as if Radiohead had taken the lesson from how The Beatles joined fragments in "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and taken it to another level. Originally, the piece was much longer, exceeding fourteen minutes, and included an extensive organ passage that Jonny Greenwood himself described as difficult to listen to. The band even joked about calling it a kind of Pink Floyd version. The final result, however, was shortened to just over six minutes, replacing that long organ solo with a more concise guitar outro. The final part, where Thom Yorke records his own incoherent screams on a dictaphone recorder, is an example of how they manipulated sound to create that unique texture.