Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden in Famous Albums

When we publish a news post discussing music, the topic often covers music services, like iTunes, or piracy, and the results of. This post doesn’t cover either of those, and it’s much more likely to make your brain explode. Interested? Of course you are. An article published by Cracked takes a look at 10 albums that have hidden easter eggs, and some you might know, and others you may not.

The most common “easter egg” on an album is a song that plays long after the “last” track on the album. In the earlier days of the CD, this actually wasn’t easy to spot, since players didn’t make it obvious that there could be more left to the CD. But with today’s players, it’s much easier to spot, so it’s hard to consider it an easter egg at all if implemented on new discs.

But the easter eggs in this article are not that simple. Take Radiohead’s hidden booklet for example. Open up a CD copy of Kid A, pop off the black CD holder, and there will be a hidden booklet which includes some random art. In another Radiohead easter egg, if you sort the songs from In Rainbows and OK Computer in such a way, it becomes clear that the two albums perfectly complement each other to the extent that it is undeniably done on purpose. I’ve yet to try this, but hope to soon.

On of my favorite bands, Tool, has an even more complicated hidden gem. If you take the title track on the band’s “10,000 Days” CD, and overlap it with Wings for Marie and Viginiti Tres, it will sound like an entirely new song, as each of the tracks work with each other rather than against. I used Audacity to get this done, and well, it’s amazing.

Perhaps the most interesting hidden feature of an album is with Information Society’s record release of Peace and Love, Inc. The last track, entitled “300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or Ascii Download)” by name alone looks like nothing but a track with a geeky title. But with a modem configured to those settings, you could call into it with a phone and play that song through the receiver. What that would do is print out a plain text story on your monitor of an experience the band had. Wow, is all I can say. The band was a one hit wonder, but that has to be one of the coolest easter eggs ever.

What probably seemed like a load of gibberish to most listeners was actually a set of instructions: If you take a standard modem, configure it with those settings, dial into it with a phone and play the track from the album into the receiver, you’ll end up with a plaintext file detailing an insanely exaggerated story about the band being extorted by the Brazilian government.