Executive Meddling/Music

Those who can sing form bands. Those who can't, meddle.

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• Seventh Star was supposed to be Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi's first solo album, but pressure from his record label forced him to bill it as an album by "Black Sabbath featuring Tony Iommi."
  • Similarly, Black Sabbath's Paranoid was supposed to be named "War Pigs". It was changed by studio execs at the last minute because they didn't want to offend supporters of The Vietnam War. Vol. 4 was going to be titled "Snowblind," but also was changed at the last moment due to the title being a cocaine reference -- on the back cover they managed to sneak by a thank you to "the great COKE-cola company" though.
• Frank Zappa suffered this during his early Mothers of Invention days. First of all, their name was changed from "The Mothers" because it was a slang term for "motherfuckers". We're Only in It for the Money suffered the most: the Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band-parodying cover was relegated to the inner sleeve. "Harry You're a Beast" had the verse "don't come in me" censored, as was the line "I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me" from "Who Needs the Peace Corps?". "Hot Poop" was their way of Getting Crap Past the Radar: taking the verse "Better look around before you say you don't care/Shut your fucking mouth 'bout the length of my hair/how would you survive/if you were alive/shitty little person?" from "Mother People" and backmasking it.
  • Even then, some editions have edited versions of "Hot Poop", in which the word "fucking" is snipped out entirely.
• Berry Gordy and Motown were infamous for denying artistic freedom to their acts and interfering every step of the way. Two well-known defiance stories: Stevie Wonder threatened to leave Motown when his contract expired unless he got artistic freedom and improved royalties. Gordy initially rejected Marvin Gaye's song "What's Going On" as a single, but Marvin went on strike until Gordy agreed to release it. It was a #2 hit and led to demand for a similar album.
• Like many musicians, Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) has had his share of disagreements with his record label, but the release of Year Zero brought with it new and exciting forms of Executive Meddling. Trent's viral marketing/Alternate Reality Game promoting the album was largely an independent effort between him and 42 Entertainment (yes, the company that made the I Love Bees ARG for Halo 2), where he purposely leaked tracks to the public; the RIAA reacted by prosecuting some of the people who posted these online. Additionally, Trent wanted to surprise the fans by pressing the CD with special thermal material that would make the disc a different color when it was removed from a heat-producing CD player; unfortunately, the marketing team got word of this and decided to advertise it as a special feature of the album, which spoiled the surprise. "Thermally reactive disc that changes color when you touch it!"
  • The thermal material has a bit more executive meddling to it, as they also hiked up the overseas price of the album $10 because of it, despite the fact that it cost almost nothing, and Trent paid the money for it out of his own pocket. This is commonly accepted to have been the final straw leading up to his going independent.
• Tony Wilson's Factory label became known for a complete lack of Meddling, or sometimes Meddling that made things more bizarre than the artists would have liked. For instance, the album sleeve for Return of the Durutti Column by The Durutti Column was made out of sandpaper, "to destroy all your other records from the inside". They also went ahead with releasing Joy Division's Closer with the planned tombstone cover, despite the whole lead singer suicide thing.
• Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson recorded a solo album in 1980, which featured Tull guitarist Martin Barre, new Tull bassist David Pegg, an unknown American drummer named Mark Craney, and "special guest" keyboardist/electric violinist Eddie Jobson (Roxy Music, U.K., Frank Zappa). Tull's label, Chrysalis Records, was going through financial troubles at the time, so they asked Ian to release it as a new Tull album to raise sales. The album was called A, as the tape boxes for Ian's album were marked "A" for "Anderson", and it led inadvertently to the sacking of three longtime Tull members. Some Tull fans were not pleased with the synthesizer sounds on the album, meant to be a break from Tull's folk-rock sound, nor the line-up changes, and a slightly more traditional sound was used for the band's follow-up, The Broadsword And The Beast. Anderson's true solo debut, the very electronic Walk Into Light, came out in 1983.
• An almost certainly positive example comes from an RCA executive to replace the cover of "Round and Round" on Ziggy Stardust. Is this where "It Ain't Easy" comes from? No, that was already going to be on there...in fact, the two were going to play back-to-back between "Moonage Daydream" and "Lady Stardust." That's right. Executive Meddling is is responsible for "Starman."
• The Chad Mitchell Trio encountered this when attempting to release their version of Bob Dylan's Blowin' In The Wind as a single. An executive at their record company balked at this, saying that there had never been a hit song with the word 'deaths' in it. The song could remain on the album, but a single release was out of the question. Of course, later on, Peter, Paul and Mary's recording of the song became a huge hit. The Chad Mitchell Trio, meanwhile, changed record companies, and their only mainstream hit after this was The Marvelous Toy, which still receives airplay on radio during the Christmas season.
• Upon hearing The Clash's debut self-titled album, the suits at their American record label decided it had too much filler, and decided to remove 5 songs and replace them with some of the band's British singles like "Complete Control" and "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais". It is almost universally agreed by critics that this actually vastly improved the album, though some also note that adding in the mostly mid-tempo and more polished singles dilutes the UK version's Three Chords and the Truth feel a bit.
  • Another reason was because the execs decided said songs were too controversial, as there was a big panic over whether punk would make people rebel against the government, and obviously songs like "Cheat and Deny" were not really in keeping with what they wanted people to think of them, they probably considered "48 Hours" and "Protex Blue" to be drug references, and the single version of "White Riot" replaces the album version to be more marketable. It is puzzling that "Jail Guitar Doors" was included as the band reluctantly recorded it as a B Side. It also annoys people that that "I Fought The Law" is included because it was recorded after their second album, by which time their style was starting to change.
  • Their second album Give Em Enough Rope was released with a completely different font on the cover and the title of the last track "All The Young Punks (New Boots And Contacts) was changed to "That's No Way To Spend Your Youth", which is a really blatant change by the execs as its nothing like what The Clash would title a song.
• Another good example: Blur's single "Popscene" -- now recognized as one of the first true Britpop singles -- failed so poorly on the UK single charts that their label, Food Records, told the band to scrap their entire second album and write new songs including one surefire hit single. Upon hearing this version, the label told them to go back again and write another single-worthy song, this time targeted to American audiences. The resulting album was the critically adored Modern Life Is Rubbish and the two singles were "For Tomorrow" and "Chemical World", which remain two of their most critically acclaimed and popular songs.
  • Upon hearing their album Parklife, the head of Food Records proclaimed it to be "single-proof" and "unreleasable". The band and every other executive on the board believed that this would be the album of 1994. The head of the label thought that the album would bomb so horribly that shortly before its release he sold the label to SBK Records and retired to the British countryside. The album sold fantastically and made Blur massive stars in the UK. The band later lightly satirized their friend and former label-head with the first single from their next album, "Country House".
• In yet another example of Executive Meddling winding up to have positive endpoint, James Blunt gave 'Weird' Al permission to do a parody of "You're Beautiful". But after "You're Pitiful" was recorded, the executives at Atlantic Records -- Blunt's label -- told Al he couldn't release the song on his next album because they feared it would turn Blunt into "a one hit wonder" (Ironically, he has not had a Billboard Top 40 appearance in the US since). So instead he released it for free online, and performs it in concert. Part of said performance is wearing an "Atlantic Records Sucks" t-shirt. Yet, this still left his next record a bit short. Al went back to the recording studio and recorded "Do I Creep You Out" and "White and Nerdy". When released as a single, the latter song became the biggest hit in Al's three-decade-long career (and its video also takes a shot at the case, when he edits Wikipedia's entry for Atlantic Records...).
  • A less positive example of Executive Meddling in Weird Al's career was his label's insistence that Dare to Be Stupid have a Cyndi Lauper parody. Al disliked the resulting song ("Girls Just Want to Have Lunch"), and decided against including it on The Food Album.
    • In fact, one obvious factor about "Girls Just Want to Have Lunch" is that Al sings it as gratingly and sarcastically as possible.
    • The Food Album (along with The TV Album) were also both the result of executives wanting compilation albums. Although Weird Al didn't like the idea of The Food Album, he preferred it to the executive's original idea, Al Unplugged, which would have been a compilation of his songs, remixed to remove the electric instruments.
  • Executive Meddling was the reason Al wrote "Christmas at Ground Zero". They kept insisting he write a "Christmas-y" song for the holiday season. They eventually regretted it.
• After the success of their 1999 pop-crossover megahit ballad "Amazed", Country music band Lonestar had big hits in the early 2000s with family-friendly, Tastes Like Diabetes songs such as "I'm Already There", and were (according to keyboardist Dean Sams) forced to record more of the same. Whenever they tried something different, such as "Class Reunion", it tanked. When their last two albums for the label both failed to produce a hit, the band finally got kicked from the label, and lead singer Richie McDonald went solo -- only to record the same diabetes-tasting material.
• K-Mart and Wal-Mart refused to sell the Nirvana album In Utero until new packaging that listed the track "Rape Me" as "Waif Me" was created. The cover art, which features anatomical drawings of a naked woman, was also changed. The only reason Kurt Cobain agreed to the changes was because when he was a kid, his family was poor and he was only able to buy music from K-Mart or Wal-Mart since there wasn't a record store in his hometown, and he empathised with kids in the same situation.
  • Averted on Nevermind. Executives wanted to censor the cover famously featuring a naked baby, but the only form of censorship Cobain would agree to was a sticker covering the penis that read "if you are offended by this you must be a pedophile". The executives backed down.
• Eels were forced by their record label into licensing "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" for Road Trip, as well as doing a video for it that alternated between clips from the movie and scenes of vocalist E driving a van with most of the main cast as passengers. In his autobiography Things the Grandchlidren Should Know, E stated that while he'd already licensed songs for movies in the past, he was none too happy to have his music associated with "a frat boy movie" - for him the only enjoyable part of making the video was a brief scene where he pretended to beat up the cast members.
  • Not only that, they also forced him to include the track on the album "Daisies of the Galaxy." E felt like the song didn't fit the tone of the album, so he got his revenge by including it only as a hidden bonus track at the end.
• Electric Six ended up reluctantly covering Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" on Señor Smoke because the record company wanted them to use it as a single. Perhaps not coincidentally, they've only ever put one other cover song on any of their albums.
• Devo's record label insisted that the "Post-Post Modern Man" video feature a Playboy model. Band member and director Jerry Casale found a tongue in cheek way to work her into the video concept he already had in mind -- instead of just Devo getting lost driving through the desert, it became Devo getting lost driving through the desert while an increasingly miffed model waited all day for their return. Then, when the video didn't get picked up by MTV, the label decided the song itself was too electronic-based to appeal to a 90's audience. Thus, an entirely different video, parodying home shopping channel programming, was made for a different mix of the song without the band's involvement.
  • Devo 2.0 was essentially a pre-teen Devo cover band marketed by Disney with a fair deal of input from Devo themselves, because they thought it was subversive or hysterical or something. A lot of the original songs had substantially rewritten lyrics due to executive meddling. Some were pretty reasonable things like excising a repeated reference to a gun in "Big Mess" or changing "Girl U Want" into "Boy U Want" and making it about an innocent crush rather than lust. Other changes were a little weirder -- in one interview Jerry Casale said "That's Good" lost the completely inoffensive couplet "Life's a bee without the buzz / it's going good 'til you get stung" because someone was convinced they were trying to get a drug reference past the censors. Apparently they took those lyrics to mean "Life is a bitch when you're not high, so make sure that you don't get caught with drugs by the police".
• The Beatles are one of the most notorious and sustained examples of this trope. It's said that the infamous "butcher" cover they did for Yesterday... and Today was because they (particularly John Lennon) objected to the way Capitol Records (their U.S. label) "butchered" their albums. (This Urban Legend has been debunked; go here for details.) On a more positive note, Capitol's treatment of the Magical Mystery Tour double-EP (expanding it into an album) was so successful that it has replaced the double-EP version, even in the British market.
  • Actually, the butcher cover was actually part of a photo shoot for the single cover of "Paperback Writer" in the UK and had nothing to do with Capitol. But the "butchering" did affect the Beatles very much, making them sign a contract with Capitol which said that all albums (excluding special cases, like Magical Mystery Tour and Hey Jude) should be exactly the same as the UK versions.
  • Famously, George Martin refused to let Ringo Starr -- who had just replaced Pete Best as the band's drummer -- play in the recording of the band's first single "Love Me Do"; having disapproved of Best's drumming, he wasn't willing to trust Starr blindly and they recorded the album with session drummer Andy White, Starr reduced to shaking a tambourine. Martin later relented and let Starr record a version with the band. The version with Starr was released as a single, and the version with White appears on the band's first album, Please Please Me.
  • EMI originally felt that "Revolution" was too distorted, and that buyers wouldn't enjoy hearing such a noisy mix. The Beatles objected, and half-won the battle - the mono mix is distorted, while the stereo mix is cleaner.
  • In a case of averted meddling, George Martin wanted their first single to be a song called "How Do You Do It?". The boys fought it all the way, insistent that they only wanted to do music they'd written themselves (with the exception of covers). When Martin persuaded them to do a run through of "How Do You Do It?", they did it with such little enthusiasm that Martin (to his credit) agreed to "Love Me Do" as the first single instead. He then tried to convince them to use "How Do You It?" as their second single, but finally set aside the song for good when he heard their retooled version of "Please Please Me". "How Do You Do It?" did go on to be a number #1 hit for Gerry and the Pacemakers.
• A case from the 18th century: Mozart's Don Giovanni contains a deeply sad and lyrical soprano aria, which out of the blue ends in 9½ bars of the most spectacular virtuoso coloratura imaginable. It seems like a hastily-tacked on display of virtuosity, and was condemned by critics as early as Berlioz as a crime against art. The reason is probably that the opera director demanded a virtuoso cadenza for his prima donna.
• Rappers get this a lot. If it's too hardcore and or socio-political there's a good chance the album will be either shelved or retooled. Same goes for the music videos; ironically, videos with Stripperific models are OK.
• Positive Executive Meddling rescued Simon and Garfunkel's career. After their first, all-acoustic album Wednesday Morning, 3 AM tanked hard upon its 1964 release, the duo split and Paul Simon moved to England. During this hiatus, the song "The Sounds of Silence" (note the plural) became popular among radio stations in Florida, while in general The Byrds had become popular as the pioneers of folk-rock, scoring hits with electric covers of Bob Dylan songs. In June 1965, producer Tom Wilson borrowed Dylan's backing band and had them overdub electric guitar, bass and drums over the original recording. The resulting single, "The Sound of Silence", entered the charts and became the duo's first #1 single. Simon accordingly returned to the USA and reunited with Garfunkel to resume their career.
• Death Metal band Deicide was rushed by Roadrunner Records to release In Torment In Hell. Because of this, the album sounds insanely generic compared to the rest of their work. Some rumors have even floated around that the band made the album that average on purpose so they could finish up their contract with the label.
• The initial master tapes of The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced? album were rejected by Reprise Records because it was thought that the feedback was unplanned distortion. The tapes were sent back to Reprise with a note explaining that the distortion was intentional and should not be corrected.
• A positive example: When Swedish hair-metal band Europe wrote the song "The Final Countdown", they had no intention of releasing it as a single -- they were just looking for a cool concert-opener. One suggestion from Epic Records later, "The Final Countdown" was the band's biggest hit single of their career.
• Judas Priest were royally fucked by Gull Records, their first label. For the first album they were given a producer who dominated the sessions and cut all of the fan-favourite songs out. After they left the label after two albums, the record company then proceeded to release half a dozen compilations of these two albums to cash in after Priest became famous. They have also messed up the track order for Sad Wings of Destiny, hence the track named "Prelude" appearing in the middle of the album. Things are so bad that Judas Priest even have a section of their discography on their website warning the fans about them.
• Aerosmith's "Janie's Got A Gun" originally contained the line "He raped an itty bitty baby," but the record company requested that Steven Tyler change it to "He jacked an itty bitty baby."
• Another case of executive meddling gone right: Tom Petty was persuaded by his producer Jimmy Iovine to re-record "Don't Do Me Like That," a song he had earlier recorded with his former band Mudcrutch, for his album Damn the Torpedoes. It became one of the biggest singles of his career.
  • Petty once fought Executive Meddling to hold the line on album prices. Miffed that MCA was increasing the list price of albums to $9.99, he threatened to rename Hard Promises "The $8.99 Album". MCA kept the album's price at $8.99.
• Metallica considered naming its debut album Metal Up Your Ass, but the label vetoed. The eventual title, Kill 'Em All, comes from Cliff Burton's suggestion on what they should do to record distributors.
• Liz Phair suffered heavily from this, having run out of money during the recording of her self-titled 2003 album. The execs refused to release her album unless she worked with the pop writing duo The Matrix (no, not that one), which produced her biggest Billboard hit, "Why Can't I?", which sounds almost nothing like the works that made her famous.
• The so-called Loudness War (which reduces the audio quality of CD recordings) is largely caused by executive meddling, and often done against the will of the artists and mastering engineers.
• Big Boi of OutKast fame was to release his first solo album Sir Lucius Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty as early as late 2008; however, Jive Records wasn't so sure the album would be able to sell. After having Big Boi rework the album once, and setting a 2009 release date, Jive once again decided they didn't like the album, telling Big Boi that his album was a "piece of art, and we don't know how to market that." Things took a turn for the worst when the executives suggested to Big Boi that he should make his own version of Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" so that they could sell the album. Big Boi packed up his things and left for Def Jam. To make things worse, Jive decided they won't let him carry over any tracks he did with group-member Andre 3000 to put on the album....so he's leaking them.
• Country Music record label Curb Records has screwed over countless artists through its policy that lead-off singles have to hit top 20 on the country music charts before the album drops. Several artists on the label — even one-time A-listers like Jo Dee Messina — have had albums delayed for years or axed entirely because the singles didn't catch on.
  • One of the biggest victims was Amy Dalley, who had seven singles between 2003 and 2007, but no album. Three of them reached #27, #23 and #29, which nearly any other label would consider reasonable enough of a peak for a lead single from a new artist, but not Curb.
  • Steve Holy had modest success with the first 3 singles from his debut album, but stores were returning it to Curb because it wasn't selling. Even though he did get a dark-horse #1 with "Good Morning Beautiful" (from the soundtrack to the film Angel Eyes), it took until the song's second week at #1 (out of five) to re-release said album with "Good Morning Beautiful" added. He then released five singles between 2003 and 2006, also getting into the mid-20s twice, but he didn't get his second album out until "Brand New Girlfriend" reached #1 in 2007. After that, he had four more flops before finally getting back on track in 2011 with the top 20 "Love Don't Run".
  • They don't even treat their flagship artist Tim McGraw with respect. He's had countless albums stalled since 2007 because his contract's running out, leading to shenanigans such as seven singles from Let It Go; a third Greatest Hits Album only one album after his last one; and a soundtrack single from Country Strong just to delay the lead-off single from the last album in his contract for a few more months. What's more, fans are almost unanimously displeased with the single releases, which have included total novelties like "Last Dollar (Fly Away)" and "It's a Business Doing Pleasure with You", weightless radio fodder like "Let It Go" and "Southern Voice", when there are plenty of better choices on each album.
  • Turned up to eleven in mid-2011: they sued him for turning in the final tracks for Emotional Traffic (the last album in his contract) too soon because they thought it was a "transparent attempt" to get out of his record deal. He countersued. And won. And once Emotional Traffic is out, he's free to go to another label.
  • LeAnn Rimes got hit with this in 2010 when her proposed covers album Lady & Gentlemen. After its lead-off single tanked, Curb tried to salvage it by releasing not one, but two non-cover songs. Both flopped, but she got the album out in 2011, with the non-covers relegated to bonus tracks.
  • Curb was completely unable to market or promote their small cache of alternative country artists, as artists in that genre are concerned less with singles for country radio (which rarely plays them) and more with albums. This is especially shown with their handling of Hank Williams III. Notably, Curb refused to release not one, not two^[1], but three of Hank III's albums due to claims the albums had objectionable or noncommercial content, all later released on other Curb imprints or independent labels. Hillbilly Joker was later released without Hank's permission after he left the label. No wonder he sometimes wears "fuck Curb" T-shirts at concerts.
• Lyric Street Records was also guilty of this to a lesser extent, pretty much ignoring any act not named Rascal Flatts. They also shed a huge amount of artists in 2004 (including Rushlow, Sonya Isaacs, Kevin Denney, Brian McComas, Deric Ruttan and Sawyer Brown, all of whom were only one or two singles into an album — in all but Rushlow and McComas' cases, the albums didn't even get released). They also had entire acts whom they didn't promote at all, including Lisa Shaffer, Ragsdale and The Parks.
• MCA Records kicked William Lee Golden out of The Oak Ridge Boys in the late 1980s because they wanted the band to appeal to a younger audience, and they didn't think they could do that with someone whose beard reached his stomach. He was replaced by Steve Sanders, and Golden later rejoined.
• The Mars Volta sort of dealt with this on Frances The Mute: They weren't expressly forbidden to make the "Cassandra Gemini" suite one thirty minute track, but were told that if they did, they'd only be paid for an EP, since the album would only have five tracks (despite the fact that it was 76 minutes long). Thus, the CD version of the album has the piece separated into 8 tracks, with track breaks that don't even correspond with the five subtitles given on the tracklisting. The version sold by iTunes and other online retailers still has it formatted as one track though, as does the vinyl version of the album.
  • Similarly, some long songs on King Crimson's earlier albums have "sub-headings" in their titles; for example, "The Court of the Crimson King including The Return of the Fire Witch and The Dance of the Puppets". According to Robert Fripp:

"The reason songs and pieces acquired separately titled sections, like 'The Return Of The Fire Witch' and 'The Dance Of The Puppets', was so the group would get paid full publishing royalties on our American record sales."

• Nellie Mc Kay suffered from executive meddling with her first record label. She wanted to record a double album, but the label insisted on a shorter release. She was eventually allowed to record a double album provided she fronted her own money for the production. She has since started her own record label.
• Avex, Ayumi Hamasaki's record company, tried to force her to release a greatest hits album, which she felt was premature. They also played up the supposed rivalry between Ayu and Utada Hikaru, in the interest of sales, which Ayu denied vehemently. She was none too pleased with the entire situation, as evidenced by her iconic choice of album art for A BEST.
• Capitol Records meddled in The Beach Boys albums at least twice. The group was told that Pet Sounds needed an obvious hit, leading to the addition of "Sloop John B.," the only cover on the album, and the only track to break from the overall introspective mood. The Boys were later told to add "Good Vibrations" to Smiley Smile, despite the fact that it was already past its prime as a hit by that point, and it bore no relation to the stripped-down style of the album.
• When the independent label Grass Records got sold, the new owners wanted to focus more on bands that would produce hit singles, so they wanted indie rockers The Wrens, their most popular band at the time, to sign a bigger contract and start recording much more commercial material: When they refused, not only were they dropped, but the two albums they'd made for the label were deleted. The Wrens did eventually find a new label and their first two albums would get reissued - Grass Records, meanwhile, turned into Wind-up Records, and did well for themselves by signing Creed, Seether and Evanescence.
• Some stations were spamming Reba McEntire's "Somebody" late at night just to give it enough spins to get to #1 for a week (knocking Tim McGraw's monster hit "Live Like You Were Dying" out of the penthouse — it came back). After the same thing happened a few weeks later with Terri Clark's "Girls Lie Too", Billboard changed its chart methodology to make manipulation harder.
• ...but Big Machine Records has blatantly manipulated the Mediabase charts just to get all the singles from Taylor Swift's Speak Now album to #1 there (they only got to #2, #3 and #2 on Billboard). This involved playing the song at the right times in the right markets.
• Also done with Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now". Capitol manipulated it just right so Lady A could get 5 weeks at #1 on Billboard (which hadn't happened in well over a year) and Luke Bryan could get a #1 on Mediabase with "Do I" (it only got to #2 at Billboard).
• The story behind this t-shirt: When Emilie Autumn was first trying to find a record deal, she had to talk with several record label executives, and every one of them invariably tried to rail her towards a more mainstream image. One of them was apparently so obnoxious and dismissive of anything she could say, Emilie allegedly abandoned the reunion to cool off and she came back after having write on the t-shirt she was wearing "Sorry, was I thinking again?". She eventually recorded her first albums under her own label, and between the first pieces of merch she sold was a replica of said tee.
• Christina Aguilera and her fans are known for thinking this about her Bionic record. This is backed up by Ladytron and Christina's other "indie" collaborator Goldfrapp both said that their tracks were ignored in the album track picking process. Ladytron only got a bonus track. This is unconfirmed, but possible.
• Sophie B. Hawkins clashed dramatically with her record label while recording her album Timbre over the use of a banjo in the song "Lose Your Way." Sophie and the label parted ways after the album was released (to very little promotion) and ended up re-releasing it with new production closer to what she originally intended.
• According to Jason Slater of Snake River Conspiracy, Warner Bros. demanded that they produce a clean version of their debut album Sonic Jihad. This was a huge problem, as their first single "Vulcan" starts out with singer Tobey Torres screaming a four-letter obscenity beginning with "F" and making vulgar references throughout. In response, Slater made a version that censored the profanity as blatantly and jarringly as possible (such as loud bursts of distorted static).
• Toby Keith is an interesting self-inflicted example. With his last several albums having all been on Show Dog-Universal Music (a label that he co-owns), he has insisted on withdrawing singles around their 15th week on the charts, regardless of position, just so he can get out one album per year. Keep in mind that an average run to #1 on the country charts is closer to 20-25 weeks, and even the A-listers can take 3 years between albums — he's basically shooting himself in the foot again and again. To be fair, at least his album releases are consistently praised by the critics.
• Britney Spears has been meddled with
  • Britney was forced to change her video "Everytime" when record label executives found out that she wanted to do a video where she kills herself. So, instead of killing herself, she passes out and drowns due to a bump on the head, only to wake up at the end of the video. Your Mileage May Vary on whether the Britney at the end was the reincarnated Britney, though.
  • The Britney album was originally supposed to be titled Shock Your Mind and was supposed to have much edgier, darker songs...she actually had co-written all but one of the tracks for the album. The label was displeased, though, and long-time producer Max Martin was called in to sweeten the sound. Britney was displeased with the meddling, though, and the two clashed in the studio, which ultimately ended in the two not working together for several years.
  • They meddled yet AGAIN by completely shelving the unreleased album The Original Doll. Britney angered her label by going on radio station KIIS-FM and playing a rough draft of the lead single for the album, "Mona Lisa," and as a result the plug was pulled completely on the project. Many believe that the label simply didn't think the album was commercial enough to sell well, which was the true reason for the album being shelved.
• Studio executives tried to do this with Rush, after the less than stellar sales of their third album, Caress of Steel. The label wanted shorter songs, with more ready to release singles. The band, sticking to their guns, recorded and released 2112 instead, which went on to become their breakthrough album.
• Florence + the Machine's hit single Rabbit Heart exists because of this trope. She wrote this song because her company wanted an upbeat poppy track to introduce her onto the radio.
• The Veronicas may have had to put "Someone Wake Me Up" instead of "Don't Say Goodbye" on their second album due to this trope.
• Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates recorded his solo album, Sacred Songs, in 1977 which was planned to be released later that same year. When presented to the higher-ups at RCA, the company thought the album would alienate fans of Hall and Oates and shelved it indefinitely and when Hall tried to rerecord some songs for Robert Fripp's solo album Exposure, the company halted the move. It wasn't until a petition by fans and critics who wanted to hear the album that RCA relented and released it in 1980. Despite being well received, many people, including Fripp, who produced the album, feel that the three year delay severely dampened the impact the album could have had on the music scene at the time.
• Hot Tuna was originally named Hot Shit, but RCA wouldn't hear of it.
• Nazareth's song "Hair of the Dog" was originally named "Son of a Bitch," but A&M Records asked the band to change the title. Strange that the song's lyrics remained untouched.
• John Mellencamp for much of his career had to deal with the fallout from Executive Meddling about his name: an early manager liked his music but thought his name was difficult, so his first album was released with his name given as "Johnny Cougar". It took him nearly fifteen years to make the change back, from Johnny Cougar to John Cougar to John Cougar Mellencamp, and finally to his own name.

1. ↑ This one they refused to release twice in different configurations!