From Brian Wilson to Aimee Mann, rock history is littered with great 'lost' albums, but most will eventually surface in some form or other, writes Anna Carey
American musician Nellie McKay has never been predictable. The 21-year-old's 2004 debut recording, Get Away From Me, was a double album of incredibly catchy songs which mixed retro-pop, torch song, jazz and hip-hop. It was a critical hit and attracted plenty of fans, selling an impressive 104,000 copies. So there were a lot of people looking forward to its successor, Pretty Little Head, which was due to be released at the end of December 2005.
Except it wasn't released. McKay's record label, Columbia, had wanted her to cut seven songs from the album; she refused and, two weeks before its scheduled release date, Columbia dropped her from its roster and cancelled the album. Pretty Little Head had joined the ranks of the "lost albums", albums recorded but never officially released.
But, as everyone from Brian Wilson to Aimee Mann knows, these albums almost always find their way out.
Albums get lost for lots of reasons. Sometimes the record label rejects the recording, sometimes the artists themselves decide to pull out at the last minute, and sometimes the band spends so long messing around in the studio that the album never actually gets finished. And sometimes the band's manager gets them to focus on a dodgy rock opera film instead (The Who's planned album Lifehouse was put on the back burner because manager Kit Lambert wanted to make the Tommy movie). But somehow, reports sneak out to the general public, creating a mythology about these unheard songs. And few albums are surrounded in more myth and rumour than the infamous lost Beach Boys album, Smile.
Beach Boy leader Brian Wilson started working on what he described as a "teenage symphony to God" in 1966. The album would be thematically linked, an ambitious "concept" album filled with humour. But things soon started to go seriously wrong. Wilson was becoming increasingly unstable and paranoid, and while recording a section of the album called "Fire", he reportedly became convinced that the music was the cause of several fires in the neighbourhood of the studio. Soon after Wilson's musical collaborator Van Dyke Parks (understandably) left the project in March 1967, the album was cancelled - and the legend began.
The proposed cover art leaked out, bootlegs of various tracks started to surface, but the original tapes were never released. Instead, in 2004, Wilson and Parks released a totally re-recorded version of the album, to critical acclaim and the delight of fans, who now finally had a definitive track list for the original album that never was.
PERHAPS THE KING of lost albums is Neil Young, who has apparently recorded six albums which were never officially released. Some were rejected by his label, but in other cases Young decided to release something else instead at the last minute. In 1975 Young recorded an album he called Homegrown, which detailed his break-up with actress Carrie Snodgrass. The album's artwork had been completed when Young suddenly decided to cancel its release and put out an earlier set of recordings, Tonight's the Night, instead.
"I had a playback party for Homegrown for me and about 10 friends," Young said in a 1975 Rolling Stone magazine interview. "We were out of our minds. We all listened to the album and Tonight's the Night happened to be on the same reel. So we listened to that too, just for laughs. No comparison."
Young told interviewer Cameron Crowe that his choice of Tonight's the Night (which he described as "the most out-of-tune thing I'd ever heard. Everybody's off-key.") was a question of mood rather than song quality. "It wasn't because Homegrown wasn't as good. A lot of people would probably say that it's better . . . I took Tonight's the Night because of its overall strength in performance and feeling. The theme may be a little depressing, but the general feeling is much more elevating . . . [ Homegrown] was just a very down album . . . It was a little too personal . . . it scared me."
Ten of Homegrown's songs eventually appeared on other albums or were regularly performed live, but the other 11 have never appeared, and for the moment they remain in what is presumably the vast vault in which Young keeps all these unreleased recordings.
It's unlikely that they'll stay hidden. It may not arrive for decades, but at some stage there'll probably be a box set or five collecting all these abandoned albums. Box sets have meant that pretty much everything ever recorded by anyone makes its way onto CD eventually, whether it's Dylan's famous 1966 Albert Hall gig or Biggie Smalls's answering machine messages, which are surely all that's left of the chubby rapper's unheard recordings at this stage.
But another sort of lost album - the albums rejected by the label - are now surfacing in a different way. Technological advances mean that it's never been easier for musicians to release music themselves. The most celebrated example of this phenomenon is the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. In 1999, Mann recorded her third album, Bachelor No 2, for longtime label Geffen. But when Geffen was absorbed into Interscope as part of a vast music industry merger, Mann found that she was not a priority at her new label. In fact, Interscope told her that if she wanted to release the album, she'd have to write some songs that were more "commercial" - and scrap most of the album on which she'd been working for two years.
Mann released herself from her contract with Interscope, but, crucially, they still owned the master tapes of the album. And so Mann got the money together to buy the master tapes from the label for what she would only describe as a "six-figure sum".
She didn't take them to another label, however. Instead, she set up her own, Superego Records, and sold the album through her website. By the time another label, V2, had agreed to give the album a general release, it had sold 25,000 copies. It's now sold more than 200,000.
WHILE MANN USED the internet to release her album the way she wanted it to sound, the internet has also meant that recordings make it out whether the artists like it or not. Bootlegged tapes used to take a while to hit the streets, and it was often difficult for all but the most devoted fans to get their hands on them. Now, however, an album can be released online in minutes, and a quick torrent search can put it on your computer a few minutes later.
This may not be good news for someone who's just released an album, but for someone with record label troubles it can be a positive thing, as Fiona Apple found out. In 2003 the troubled musician was struggling with the recording of her long-awaited third album with long-term producer Jon Brion (who also works with Aimee Mann); her label, Epic, thought that Apple's new recordings weren't "commercial" enough (sound familiar?) and asked her to re-record many tracks. The album had a title - Extraordinary Machine - but no official release date, when a Seattle DJ somehow got his hands on some of the recorded tracks. And an internet phenomenon was born.
Soon fans were downloading the entire album online, and a fan campaign called Free Fiona was besieging Apple's label with letters, e-mails and even apples, requesting an official release. It almost seemed not to need one - the bootlegged version achieved the bizarre distinction of getting reviews in the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly despite not having been officially released. Soon Apple herself was back in the studio rearranging many of the songs with a new producer, Mike Elizondo, who admitted that it was weird working on an album which in one form was already out there, but said he was grateful to fans for rescuing a lost album. "The way they interpreted it was, the label isn't putting out her record, so we're going to do it for her," he said. "That's very admirable."
Will the same thing happen to Nellie McKay? Well, she's been dropped by her label, so they're unlikely to fund a return to the studio. And they still own her recordings (although, as she and her mother funded much of the recording sessions themselves, buying the masters back may prove easier than it was for Aimee Mann). But the album, like so many lost albums before it, has already taken on a life of its own, and McKay and Pretty Little Head are unlikely to languish without a label for long. "We've been getting a lot of phone calls," McKay told the Washington Post. "We haven't had to make one, which is kind of nice. We're just taking in all the options . . . Who knows, but the future may be indie." Whatever happens, she won't get lost.
Please release me: the top 10 famous lost albums
Bob Dylan - The Basement Tapes
Recorded by Dylan and the Band in the "lost year" following his motorbike accident in 1966, a 1975 official release featured just 24 of more than 100 recorded songs.
Kraftwerk - Technopop
The German electro pioneers reportedly pulled the album when they heard Michael Jackson's Billie Jean and realised that their analog production techniques were behind the times.Technopop was later reworked as 1986's Electric Cafe.
Jimi Hendrix - First Rays of the New Rising Sun
The album on which Hendrix was working before his death in 1970 was finally released in 1997.
Guns 'N'Roses - Chinese Democracy
Will it ever be released? Has it even been recorded? Who knows? Axl Rose has been working on it for over a decade.
The Who - Lifehouse
Much of this planned album eventually surfaced on Who's Next.
Prince - The Black Album
Prince cancelled the release of this 1987 recording after promo copies had been sent out, and the resulting bootleg sold 200,000 copies. The album was officially released in 1994.
The Butthole Surfers - After the Astronaut
When the band were dropped by their label before the album was released, they had to re-record the entire thing and release it on an indie label.
Marvin Gaye - Vulnerable
Gaye started planning this collection of jazz and pop standards in the 1960s; it was finally released in 1997.
Aimee Mann - Bachelor No.2
Mann changed the rules of the music business when she rescued her own lost album and released it herself.
Brian Wilson - Smile
The ultimate lost album has never been officially released; a re-recorded version came out in 2004.