10 Perfect Rock Songs That Were Written By Accident

There's a lot more that goes into writing a classic song than most people realize. As much as some people might like to claim that they got lightning in a bottle when they went into the studio, you have to put a lot of heart and soul into what you're doing before you actually create something that will stand the test of time. Then again, sometimes the greatest ideas happen when you least expect them to.

For all of the amazing songs on this list, they were never meant to be the big single of their respective records or anything. In fact, most of these weren't meant to be a part of the band's discography at all, being originally just short little song fragments that the band had been toying with. Somewhere along the line though, these went from the standard jams to something a lot more inspired, with everyone knuckling down and making some of the greatest music of their career out of it.

In most cases, you can't even ask the band themselves how something like this happened, with most of them just screwing around until they found something that actually worked. Inspiration can come from all different places though, and what you see as crap one day might become what you're remembered for years down the line.

Any band of Radiohead's ilk is going to try to put some experimental stuff into every track they create. You can try adding some weird instruments or random time signature changes, but it's just as easy to find some cool sounds when you put a instrument on there played backwards. Then again, there are those few times when that approach works a little too well.

Around the time that the band were working in the sessions that would give birth to Kid A and Amnesiac, they had originally planned to include the song I Will before deciding that it needed some work. In an attempt to figure out what worked better, the band decided to play the whole track backwards, and they ended up absolutely loving what they heard. Instead of just going forward with that setup though, Thom Yorke thought it would be better to write an entire song in that format, coming up with a new lyric and vocal melody that turned into Like Spinning Plates.

So the reason why the whole song sounds like it's floating on air is because you're hearing the original Radiohead song that's been played entirely in reverse. You can still hear the original version of the song fully realized though, with I Will eventually turning up on their next record Hail to the Thief. Inspiration comes from all sorts of places, so you should never underestimate the power of putting things the wrong way around.