If there is anything that can make a strident music fan salivate in anticipation, it’s the idea of an unreleased track or lost album from a favourite band. It’s like catnip for the musicologist and can become like a biblical quest for a lost chalice of sound for the collector of rare grooves and scrapped singles. There are many reasons why an album or song never sees the light of day. Maybe the record company decided that the world wasn’t quite ready for a 2-hour concept album about a goose (see cult British band Camel’s 1975 album ‘Snow Goose’). Or maybe the artist just decided their vision for the album had failed and it was shelved. Singles have been unreleased for legal reasons and band disputes, some artists with a prolific work ethic simply have so much music that recordings get locked away and forgotten about. Record companies celebrate in posthumous glee, the chance to cash in on anything they can release after the demise of their best-selling client, and a glut of lost recordings will usually surface. This may go on for several years until every last song and alternative version of a classic has been milked to death. It only takes a rumour or a whisper of a possible lost tape or forgotten session and the avid music lover can be sent into overdrive imagining there may be something lurking in a dark vault or a dusty attic somewhere. So let’s drop the needle onto that long-playing record and take a look at the lost songs and unreleased albums of popular music.
Inside Prince‘s Vault
Considered as one of the best performers and musicians to ever come out of America, Prince was also one of most prolific songwriters. He wasn’t just satisfied with releasing some of the most iconic songs of the 1980s and 90s, but he was also providing other musicians with some of their biggest hits. As Prince would once say in concert ‘’I got too many hits” – and he wasn’t joking. Some of the originals he penned and gave to other artists include, “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinead O’Connor, “Manic Monday” for the Bangles, “How Come You Don’t Call Me” for Alicia Keys, “Waiting Room” for No Doubt, and “I Feel For You” for Chaka Khan, to name a few.
His studio and compound in Paisley Park, Minnesota is where he kept all his unreleased material – in a veritable vault – that only he knew the access code to. After his death, the estate had to drill it open and found enough unreleased material to release a new album every year for the next century. It has been speculated that 70% of Prince’s music was never released, while what he did actually release includes 39 studio albums, 4 live albums, 13 EPs, and 104 singles. With his estate now in the hands of his family, who knows what musical treasures will find their way into the light?
Michael Jackson & Willy Wonka
Jackson had reportedly always been a big fan of the 1971 film starring Gene Wilder. So much so that when it was announced there would be a 2005 remake directed by Tim Burton, Jackson felt he just had to play the lead role of Wonka. He coveted the role so much that he went as far as to write and record the entire soundtrack, in the hopes that his level of commitment would ingratiate his intent upon the project. Warner Brothers disagreed but loved the album anyway and offered Jackson a smaller role for the use of the music. Jackson didn’t take the rejection well and shelved the whole album. It now lives in an undisclosed location under the care of his family estate with a plethora of other unreleased material discovered after his death (also kept in a vault) dating back to the Jackson 5 days.
The buried Charles Manson x The Beach Boys album
Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys, had a notorious and unsettling connection with Charles Manson, the cult leader and orchestrator of one of the most infamous murder sprees in history. Wilson, who revealed he had befriended and collaborated with Charles Manson before the murders, financed production of an album of Manson’s songs, about ten songs, which were never released. Recorded in Wilson’s own home, the album was described by Beach Boys engineer Steve Desper as “pretty good… he had musical talent.” Even Brian Wilson (Dennis’ brother) had producer credits on the album. Although the album never saw the light of day, The Beach Boys took one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist”, and re-wrote some lyrics, releasing it under a different title on their 20/20 album in 1969. The alleged ‘stolen’ Manson track is “Never Learn Not to Love” and was credited solely to Dennis Wilson without Manson’s consent. When Manson found out, he sent death threats to Dennis and some historians speculate whether the event might have been one of the contributing factors that triggered the Tate/LaBianca murders, which happened that same year. It’s rumoured that bootleg versions of Manson’s album recorded with the Wilson brothers do exist, but according to music historian Andrew Doe, even if they were to be found, there’s “not a hope in hell” they would ever be released.
Speaking of the Beach Boys, let’s talk about the secrets behind their Smile!
The “lost album” of the Beach Boys, often referred to as SMiLE, is one of the most famous unreleased albums in rock history and would become one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ of the 1960s, coming off the back of their massively influential album Pet Sounds in 1966, an album in part that would inspire the Beatles to go on to create Sgt Peppers. Brian Wilson had teamed up with a co-writer, Van Dyke Parks, a 23-year-old former child actor who had arrived on the LA scene looking to write for Disney films. He’d been working with the Byrd’s before hitting it off with Wilson.
Smile was meant to explore the progression of American music from the jumping-off point of folk and jazz up to the present day in a psychedelic journey through sound. Pet Sounds hadn’t been the commercial success that Capital records had hoped for, and Wilson was spending more and more time and money in the studio ‘experimenting’. ‘Good Vibrations’, written for the album, was finished and mixed to alleviate some of the pressure on Wilson. It was a hit, and groundbreaking in its production and composition, and seemed to signal what was to come from the Smile sessions. Friction with the other Beach Boy members had started after Wilson had replaced them in the studio with the ‘Wrecking Crew’, the top session band in LA at the time.
Wilson’s health and mental stability had also begun to deteriorate from prolonged drug use, triggering an undiagnosed episode of schizophrenia. Sessions began to fall apart. Paul McCartney, in an apparent PR stunt, turned up to one session and reportedly chewed some celery on the track “Vega-Tables”. The sessions were scrapped and just a few weeks later, Sgt Peppers would be released by The Beatles and go on to change the face of popular music. Smile would move into the realm of mythical folklore as the magnus opus that never was. In 2004, Wilson and Van Dyke would revisit the project and re-record Smile, 37 years after it was first envisioned to critical acclaim. But it will always linger in the ‘what if’ category of the classic albums of the late 1960s.
Mariah Carey’s Grunge Album
When you think of Mariah Carey, you don’t necessarily think of a grunge rock chick. What tends to come to mind is a warbling melismatic 5-octave superstar who usually gets played over the radio on repeat at Christmas. But what if we told you that in the 90s, while recording her massive selling album Daydream, Carey also produced and recorded a grunge album titled Someone’s Ugly Daughter. The story surfaced in Carey’s 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. She had been influenced by the likes of Nirvana, Hole and L7 to try her hand at the-then hugely popular genre that had arrived from Seattle and swept into the global music charts. Carey was all for releasing it, but the record company had other ideas, maybe not wanting to tarnish the pop princess’s squeaky clean image or alienate her fan base – or maybe they wisely decided that the grunge crowd wouldn’t accept the starlet into the ranks of the unwashed. It was ultimately released by an American rock band called Chick, and Carey’s lead vocals replaced. Recently in a Rolling Stone interview, Carey spoke on the subject and confessed to finding the original recording with her vocals intact and had a plan to release it in the not-so-distant future.
Jimi Hendrix’s Black Gold
For Jimi Hendrix fans, Black Gold is the holy grail of lost recordings, an acid-fuelled exploration into a biographical concept of a superhuman, portrayed by himself in a range of alter egos lost in the fog of troubles that he was experiencing at the end of the 60’s. What he recorded on a home tape machine were the songs that would make up his 4th studio album, inspired by the comics he’d loved as a child and the psychedelic concept albums of the 60’s. The songs that had been laid down included “Captain Midnight 1201”, “God Bless The Day” and “The Jungle Is Waiting”, none of which have been heard since his death. What also has fans bewitched with, is that Hendrix was playing acoustic throughout the lost recordings, something of a rarity for the overdriven king of volume and the electric guitar. After his death, the tapes disappeared with various theories of what had become of them; none bore fruit until in 1992, a journalist tracked them down to a drummer and long-term friend, Mitch Mitchell. Hendrix had given them to him for safekeeping before his death. Mitchell died in 2008, but rumours of its release have routinely surfaced every few years since 2011, without anything materialising.
Britney’s Lost Duets
Britney Spears’ unreleased material includes songs co-written by artists such as Justin Timberlake (“She’ll Never Be Me“) and Lady Gaga, who originally intended Britney to duet with her on “Telephone” (listen to the leaked demo here). For reasons unclear, Spears or her team allegedly rejected it for inclusion on her Circus album, and Gaga replaced Britney with Beyonce.
The Never-ending Beatles Cash Machine
As lost songs and unreleased albums go, the one band that will set the internet alight and cash registers ringing is the announcement of a new Beatles track. Since the ’90s and the release of the Beatles anthology series and new singles “Free Like a Bird” and “Real Love”, the public has been treated to outtakes from albums, stripped-back recordings, and more recently, the 2021 documentary film Get Back and the 2023 single, “Now and then”, cited as the last ever Beatles single. For a band that was only going for 10 years, the amount of interest that is still shown in anything that the Fab 4 did, said, recorded or played on, is a testament to how culturally important they were and still continue to be today, and of course, every time anything is put out by the Beatles, people tend to earn a lot of money.
“The Carnival of Light” is a 1967 track that was recorded at the Penny Lane session and the same year Sgt Pepper was released. It’s the Beatles at their most experimental. It had been commissioned for the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, an event that had taken to holding trippy happenings at an old British railway building. With only a few people ever having heard the track, it’s been described as a throbbing organ-based rhythmic freak outfit that would predate Lennon’s “Revolution 9” from The White Album and offer a glimpse into Paul McCartney’s interest in the avant-garde. McCartney was reportedly keen to include it on the Anthology series, but was left off in the end. Beatles fans remain confident it will happen one day.Paul McCartney later said of the track “It does exist, yeah. We recorded it in about fifteen minutes. It’s very avant garde – as George would say ‘avant garde a clue’ – and George did not like it ’cos he doesn’t like avant garde music”
Cold Cuts (also known as Hot Hitz/Kold Kutz) is an unreleased album of outtakes by Paul McCartney recorded during his solo career and with Wings in the 1970s and 1980s. The album was originally planned to be released in 1975 and McCartney revisited the project several times over the years until it was abandoned permanently in the late 1980s.
Green Day’s Stolen Master Tapes
We have covered lost songs, and we have discussed unreleased albums, but what we haven’t covered is when a whole album gets stolen. This is what happened to the band Green Day in 2003. Cigarettes and Valentines was intended as the follow-up to their 2000 album Warning, but the master tapes vanished from the studio just as the album was completed and ready for release. No trace has been heard or seen of it since. Instead of going back in and rerecording the whole album again, Green Day decided to start again and came out with the seminal album American Idiot.
Green Day’s album would just become another lost record that has disappeared into the musical abyss, the creative black hole that sucks in some projects and decides that the time is just not right for the birth of a new sound. Many more exist and continue to tease and drive fans mad with their whereabouts, but maybe that’s just what they want.
