10 Legendary Rock Albums That Were Originally Very Different

For all of the great songs that a musician is able to come up with, any record is only as good as the producer that's working with them. The Beatles wouldn't have sounded half as good without George Martin, and there's a good chance that the Red Hot Chili Peppers owe the back half of their career to their work done with Rick Rubin behind the scenes. Radiohead had their fifth member in Nigel Godrich for the longest time, but the woodshedding sessions of In Rainbows had someone new in the control room.

When it looked like some scheduling conflicts prevented them from working together, the initial sessions for the album were spent with producer Mark Spike Stent, who's resume was a bit more eclectic than what a band like Radiohead were known for. Though there may have been some overlapping art rock acts that he worked with like Bjork, his work with pop stars like Madonna and Beyonce was a bit alarming for fans that were looking for the same boundary pushing songs that Thom Yorke was known for.

The honeymoon period only lasted a few weeks though, and Nigel was back at the helm as Radiohead fine tuned some of the greatest songs of their career, taking the benchmark they set for themselves on OK Computer and honing their chops that much more. There's definitely a pop friendly edge left over from the Stent years, but In Rainbows never stops being a Radiohead project from back to front.