One discovery. One song. Changed forever.
The very first voice on the album belongs to Dennis Hopper, who passed away in 2010. It was resampled from outtakes of his vocals on Demon Days. The album's theme announced in its opening second by someone no longer here.
In the original 1999 Gorillaz manifesto, Russel Hobbs was designed to channel dead musicians through his body. For 25 years that was fiction. On The Mountain, with six artists whose voices were found in the archives, Albarn finally made it real.
The emotional centrepiece of OK Computer was recorded in five hours for a charity album two years before the rest of the record existed. The band tried to improve it. They couldn't. You're hearing the original take.
OK Computer is 01 in binary. In Rainbows is 10. Released exactly ten years apart. Interleave the tracklists and they flow as one album. Someone close to Yorke confirmed: "He has been expecting someone to notice for years."
The animal sounds at the end are sequenced so each animal could theoretically eat the one before it. The rooster at the end matches the key of the next track. Both transitions were deliberate.
Four people on three pianos struck an E major chord simultaneously. Take nine was the one. Geoff Emerick pushed the faders higher as the sound decayed. It sustains for over 40 seconds.
Clare Torry was 25, had never heard the song, and was paid the standard rate: £30. She improvised the vocal and left embarrassed. It took 31 years and a lawsuit to get a co-writing credit.
The closing words are spoken by Gerry O'Driscoll, the Abbey Road doorman: "There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." The most famous album of the 1970s is narrated by people you've never heard of.
Built on a sample from a 1973 computer music composition by Paul Lansky, created on a Princeton mainframe. The most futuristic track on the album is built on music older than most of the band, made by a computer that no longer exists.
The first million pressings contained a 48-page booklet hidden beneath the CD tray. Political diatribes, melting glacier data, Tony Blair surrounded by nonsense. One million hidden messages. Most were never found.
Kevin Shields turned the guitar tone all the way down, strummed in double time while bending the tremolo bar into a reverse reverb program. No chorus pedals. No flangers. "No other band played that guitar like me."
Shields used nineteen different studios because he was chasing specific room sounds he could never quite find. The album cost a rumoured £250,000 and nearly bankrupted Creation Records.
McCartney asked for it to be removed from the medley. Engineer John Kurlander was told never to throw anything away, so he spliced it to the end of the tape. Mastering engineer Malcolm Davies, also told never to throw anything away, cut a lacquer including it. The first hidden track in rock history exists because two engineers independently followed the same instruction.
Contains the only drum solo Ringo Starr ever played on a Beatles record, followed by the only three-way guitar solo: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison taking turns in pairs of two bars.
Nicki Minaj's verse on Monster is widely considered to outperform Kanye on his own album. She recorded multiple characters with different voices. It announced her as a major force in hip-hop.
Chris Rock improvised the comedy sketch at the end in one take. It was never re-recorded. A breakup album's most vulnerable moment turned painfully funny by a comedian with a microphone and no script.
The album has 24 tracks and no tracklist. Only one has a name: "Blue Calx." The rest were represented by sepia photographs. Fans named them themselves. The album's identity was crowdsourced before crowdsourcing existed.
The artwork is not a photograph or a design. Richard D. James scratched the Aphex Twin logo into the back of a leather travel case using a razor blade and a compass. His friend photographed it.
Christine McVie wrote it about Curry Grant, the band's lighting director, with whom she was having an affair. When her ex-husband John asked what the song was about, she told him it was about her dog. He played bass on the track.
The only song in Fleetwood Mac's catalogue credited to all five members. It was assembled from fragments of different rejected songs. The drums and guitar were the only instruments recorded in each other's company.
On July 3, 1973, Bowie announced mid-concert at the Hammersmith Odeon: "Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it's the last show that we'll ever do." The Spiders from Mars didn't know. The audience didn't know. The band learned they were being fired live onstage.
July 6, 1972. Bowie performed "Starman" with his arm draped around Mick Ronson. For queer teenagers watching across Britain, it was the first time they saw someone like themselves on television.
For years, journalists speculated the anonymous producer was Aphex Twin, Four Tet, or Fatboy Slim. On 5 August 2008, William Bevan posted a photo on MySpace and wrote: "I'm a lowkey person and I just want to make some tunes."
The vinyl crackle on Untrue is fake. It was deliberately added to digital recordings. The rain is sampled. The sound of a London bus stop at 3am was constructed, not captured.
Prince sped up his vocals to create a female alter ego. Not a falsetto -- a tape-speed manipulation. Camille was meant to be released without Prince's name. An experiment in whether music could exist without celebrity.
Warner Bros. forced a triple album down to a double. Seven tracks removed. The 2020 reissue finally released 63 previously unreleased tracks from those sessions. The vault is still not empty.
The album ends with Kendrick "interviewing" Tupac using audio from a rare 1994 Swedish radio recording. The questions were written to fit Tupac's archived answers. The last question receives silence. Tupac's words ran out.
Every track adds a line to a spoken word poem. You don't realize it's building until the final track, when Kendrick recites the whole thing before the Tupac conversation begins. The album was the poem all along.