How Do Bad Songs End Up on Great Albums?

4 days ago 1

We break down the ill-considered decisions that lead to tracks from the Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" to Elton John's "Jamaica Jerk-Off"

How does a truly terrible song end up an otherwise flawless album? Blame ego-appeasing band-politics concessions, drug-fueled studio experiments, songwriters working through a few too many personal demons, and artists who just ran out of songwriting steam a little too soon. Or maybe it all comes down to bad judgment.

In any case, Rolling Stone‘s Andy Greene recently found 50 examples of classic albums with at least one bad song, and he goes through his entire list with host Brian Hiatt on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. (Along the way, he concedes he may have included the wrong track from Thriller.) To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.

The songs discussed in the podcast also fall into some other repeated categories, including spoken-word experiments (The Doors‘ “Horse Latitudes”), orchestral missteps (Neil Young‘s “There’s A World”), and unfortunate accents (

id="auto-tag_genesis" data-tag="genesis">Genesis‘ “Illegal Alien,” Elton John‘s “Jamaica Jerk-Off”). Then there’s the rare song that brings together two typical mistakes: The Police‘s “Mother,” from Synchronicity, combines the band-politics move of throwing (otherwise brilliant) guitarist Andy Summers an album track with his way-too-personal confessions: “Every girl that I go out with/ Becomes my mother in the end.”

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