Everything in Its Right Place

2000 song by Radiohead
the song by Radiohead

"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.

Following the success of Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer, the songwriter, Thom Yorke, had a mental breakdown. He suffered from writer's block and became disillusioned with rock music. 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." "Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote, 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." He would "endlessly" play the "Everything in its Right Place" melody, attempting to "meditate out of" his depression. 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." The line "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" references the sour faced expression Yorke said he wore "for three years".

According to the bassist, Colin Greenwood, Radiohead's producer, Nigel Godrich, was initially unimpressed by "Everything in its Right Place". Radiohead worked on the song in a conventional band arrangement in Copenhagen and Paris, but without results. Yorke and Godrich transferred the song from piano to a Prophet 5 synthesiser. Godrich processed his vocals in Pro Tools using a scrubbing tool. 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." 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". O'Brien observed that it lacked the crescendos typical of Radiohead's previous songs.