Paranoid Android
by Radiohead
- 84
- BPM
- G minor
- Key
- 6A
- Camelot
- 26
- Danceability
- 4
- Acousticness
Jonny Greenwood played the part that nearly sank "Paranoid Android". The first version of the song ran over 14 minutes and ended in a long Hammond organ outro by Greenwood. Guitarist Ed O'Brien said the band laughed through it, and Thom Yorke sarcastically called it a Pink Floyd cover. Greenwood later said the organ solo was hard to listen to without clutching the sofa for support. Radiohead cut the song to about six and a half minutes and put a shorter guitar solo in its place. Greenwood also wrote the third section, and he got the tone of his solo by running the guitar through a Mutronics Mutator rack unit.
Yorke wrote the lyrics after an unpleasant night in a Los Angeles bar, where strangers high on cocaine surrounded him and a woman turned violent when someone spilled a drink on her. The title comes from Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yorke said it was a joke.
The band recorded it at St Catherine's Court, a 15th-century mansion near Bath, with producer Nigel Godrich. It came out on May 26, 1997, as the lead single from OK Computer and reached number three on the UK Singles Chart, Radiohead's highest position there. Magnus Carlsson directed the animated video, and MTV censored its nudity in the United States.
Paranoid Android runs at 84 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.86 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 714 ms. It is in G minor, Camelot 6A, which shares its notes with Bb major and mixes cleanly with C minor and D minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.