Earlier this week, Australian pop/folk muso Ben Lee surprise-released an album called A Mixtape From Ben Lee. Jam-packed with special guests, the record is collection of forgotten songs that had been sitting on Lee’s hard drive for years and years.
There’s a great history of musicians having whole albums that remain unreleased to the world, whether it be due to label problems, tragedy, or just personal creative decisions. We take a look at some of the (potentially) greatest albums the world never heard.
The Beach Boys – Smile
Perhaps the most famous example of an unreleased record, Smile was The Beach Boys album set to follow the seminal Pet Sounds. The album is as famous for what could have been as it is for the unusual circumstances in which it was recorded.
There are so many stories floating around the internet about what happened during the Smile sessions – stories such as frontman/primary songwriter Brian Wilson allegedly purchasing $2,000 worth of marijuana for the recording sessions, and telling people to wear toy fireman hats while recording the ‘fire’ section of a song called ‘The Elements’.
But on the bright side, if Brian Wilson didn’t really do all that, we wouldn’t have had this scene from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (AKA the greatest movie of all time):
Smile was described by Wilson as “a teenage symphony to God”. One of the only songs to be released from the sessions was ‘Good Vibrations’, a classic Beach Boys track that left fans wondering what else Smile was capable of.
Eventually, the album did make its way to the public, albeit in different forms. The Beach Boys released Smiley Smile in 1967, serving as a substitute for the lack of completion of the Smile sessions. In 2004, after a series of live concerts, Brian Wilson Presents Smile was released – his attempt at re-recording what Smile could have been. Finally, in 2011 The Smile Sessions was released, a amalgamation of what Smile might have sounded like with comprehensive studio outtakes thrown in.
Green Day – Cigarettes And Valentines
Critics will say that Green Day were floundering in the early 2000s. Their sixth album Warning left a lot to be desired, and several years after the release of their breakout album Dookie, many people thought that the flame was gone.
Still, the band set to work on their next album,Cigarettes And Valentines, which by the middle of 2003, was nearing completion – until someone stole all the master recordings from Green Day’s studio, leaving them with nothing.
Green Day, faced with the task of completely re-recording a whole album, did what any band would do: ditched the entire record, wrote again from scratch, created one of the most iconic albums of the 2000s in American Idiot, and saved their career. Nice one, guys.
To this day, the band has never found out who stole the album or where the master recordings ended up. In interviews they’ve called the incident a “blessing in disguise”, and it’s hard to argue. Still, the title track did eventually turn up in the form of a performance on their 2011 live album Awesome As Fuck:
Bruce Springsteen – Electric Nebraska
Nebraska was the sixth album by Bruce Springsteen, and a departure from his previous work. This solo recording effort focused on grim blue-collar stories, and intimate and sparse recordings. It remains, however, one of his most highly regarded albums, bringing us songs like ‘Atlantic City’ and ‘Johnny 99’.
The album was demoed in Springsteen’s home using a four-track recorder. The Boss then brought the album to the E Street Band to record the full album. But producers and musicians around the studio sessions felt that Springsteen’s home demos had a haunting folk essence that was more powerful. Thus it was decided they would officially release the demos as the official album, ditching the band sessions.
The full-band version of the album (now dubbed Electric Nebraska) was fully completed, but never released. Fans of The Boss consider it the Holy Grail of bootlegs, and are all waiting for the day that it is finally released to the world.
Weezer – Songs From The Black Hole
Weezer broke onto the scene in 1994 with their self-titled album (lovingly referred to as The Blue Album), fusing a little bit of punk with a hell of a lot of super catchy pop, and winning over teenage hearts everywhere with songs like ‘Buddy Holly’ and ‘Say It Ain’t So’.
Frontman Rivers Cuomo isn’t one to do things half-arsed (although, some of their recent albums…), so when it came to following up The Blue Album, he set to work on a space-themed, sci-fi rock opera. It was a story about a space crew in the year 2126, all a metaphor to explore Cuomo’s conflicted feelings about fame, touring and the music industry.
Cuomo thought that the album was “too whimsical”, and ditched it in favour of Pinkerton; a darker, sadder, but just as catchy follow up to The Blue Album. Some of the songs from the abandoned release were transferred into Pinkerton, wheras others didn’t appear until Cuomo started releasing his Alone demo sessions. Fans have tried to piece the album together online, but no full release exists.
Sadly, Pinkerton failed to land with audiences in 1996, with Rolling Stone calling it “juvenile” and “aimless”. Since then though the music world has realised its true place as a seminal pop-punk/emo album, with Rolling Stone calling it the 16th greatest album of all time in 2002. Funny how things change, right?
Guns N’ Roses – Chinese Democracy
An album that never was from one of the most influential rock bands on the planet. Except after years of delays and assumptions it had been abandoned, Chinese Democracy finally did come out in 2008.
Oh dear. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been released after all.
