Everything in Its Right Place

"Everything in Its Right Place" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead, released as the opening track of their fourth studio album, Kid A (2000).

The lyrics were inspired by the stress felt by the singer, Thom Yorke, while promoting Radiohead's album OK Computer (1997).

Radiohead worked on it in a conventional band arrangement before transferring it to synthesiser, and described it as a breakthrough in the album recording.

"[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.

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?'

[9] The line "yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" references the sour-faced expression Yorke said he wore "for three years".

[15] The lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, said "Everything In Its Right Place" 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.

[12] The guitarist Ed O'Brien and the drummer, Philip Selway, said it forced them to accept that not every song needed every band member to play on it.

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.

[16] 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".

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".

... "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.

[20] In a 2020 piece for the Guardian, 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.