Lost in the Flood: 5 Songs Left Off of Great Albums
This week's songs are from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, the Rolling Stones, and Joni Mitchell
In Memoriam: Roberta Flack
"I've been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson. If everybody said I sounded like one person, I'd worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I've got my own style."
Roberta Flack - “Compared to What”
As a 90s kid, my first awareness of Roberta Flack was in the wake of the Fugees cover of “Killing Me Softly.” Prior to getting her big break (getting a song into a Clint Eastwood movie), Flack was a school teacher in Washington D.C., gigging at night and releasing albums on Atlantic Records. The funky, jazzy, “Compared to What” is full of tension and release, but is still a slow burner and a great showcase for the many facets of her dynamic voice. It was used perfectly in the great Boogie Nights, giving a subtle freneticism to characters spinning upwards not yet aware of how far they have to fall.
The weird thing about February is that some years it’s missing the 29th. I don’t need to explain the concept of Leap Year to anyone, but it’s odd that there are different versions of it, depending on the year. Some years you get the extended edition, and it makes you wonder why it wasn’t there all along.
This February, Wilco released an extended edition of A Ghost is Born. At the time of release, it was a much-anticipated follow-up to what’s considered their masterpiece (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). Right around then Jeff Tweedy also went into rehab for prescription drug addiction. Tweedy has since described the album as a way of articulating everything he was feeling at the time—a “biblical” sense of dread, debilitating headaches, a very intense feeling that he was dying, and the need to communicate who he was to his children if that were to happen. It was a confusing and chaotic time, and despite that, he seemed to have a clear vision of what he wanted to communicate and how he wanted to communicate it. Unlike the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot extended edition, I’m baffled as to why some of the previously unreleased songs were left off the album. They fit into the tone of the original album, both sonically and thematically.
This isn’t the first, or even best, example of that happening. Some of my favorite Beatles songs were left off of albums (“We Can Work It Out,” “The Ballad of John & Yoko,” “Don’t Let Me Down”). Artists of a certain caliber will approach every album like it’s a complete work, built around a central idea or sound. The songs work in relation to one another, flow together in a sequence, shed light on multiple facets of a feeling, event, or period of time. In that process of shaping the work, some stuff gets cast aside. Some of it fragments, or rough sketches, but occasionally fully realized, completed songs.
Regardless of how good a song might be on its own merits, if an artist or producer, or manager (or label) doesn’t thinks it fits right, it’s gone. Maybe it shares too much in common with another song, doesn’t contribute to the theme, or runs counter to it. If we’re lucky, artists are able to unload these songs onto soundtracks, others are stored away, waiting for an anniversary release or a box set to see the light of day. Once they do, fans are left wondering why a great song was kept from them for so long. Tweedy himself sings about the best songs getting left off albums (and forgotten entirely) in the closing track of A Ghost is Born:
The greatest lost track of all time
The Late Greats' "Turpentine"
You can't hear it on the radio
You can't hear it anywhere you go
The song might be fictional, but the notion isn’t. Great stuff gets lost in the shuffle, forgotten, or cast into the dustbin of history. What can you do?
Sticking with some household names, here are 5 songs that were left off great albums, but maybe shouldn’t have been.
“I try to use my material in the most effective way. The songs were written to the glory of man and not to his defeat, but all of these songs added together doesn’t even come close to my whole vision of life. Sometimes the things that you liked the best and that have meant the most to you are the things that meant nothing at all to you when you first heard or saw them. Some of these songs fit into that category.” - Bob Dylan, on Oh Mercy!
Bob Dylan - “Born in Time” (Left off of Oh Mercy!)
Dylan is known for doing this. A lot. But in the 1980s, he (by his own admission) was out of touch with his inner voice. He was dissociated from his music and felt adrift. His output for much of the decade was spotty at best. Oh Mercy! is an exception. It was the first of many “Dylan’s Back!” albums. Working with producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel), they pulled together a collection of songs—many about questioning, regret, and the mystery in between. “Born in Time” would’ve fit right into Oh Mercy! (While I have you here: I’ll add that this wasn’t the only song he did this with on this album. According to Lanois, “Series of Dreams” was slated to be the opening track on the album until Dylan nixed it. My theory on that is Dylan thought Lanois brought too much of his U2 sound into it.)
Now, if I told you Dylan brought in producer Don Was, David Crosby, Randy Jackson, and Bruce Hornsby to re-record “Born in Time” after this version was on tape, would you believe me if I told you that newer version was really crummy? You should. It was released on Under the Red Sky within a year of Oh Mercy! It slows the lament down into a ballad. The instruments punch through the melody trying to get noticed. There’s no mystery, just begging. The Oh Mercy! version included here is a great example of Lanois’ atmospheric production at work (as is all of Oh Mercy!). Along with “Series of Dreams,” it was released on Dylan’s Bootleg Series vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs in 2008.
With only 10 songs, there was room for more tracks on Oh Mercy! Were it included just after “Man in the Long Black Coat,” it would telegraph where Dylan is going on side 2, which contains 4 of the 5 best songs he released that decade, all about a man struggling to make sense of a fractured relationship. On “Born in Time,” Dylan depicts two people who had powerful moments of connection that were ultimately fleeting. So he’s put the beginning and the end of that relationship on the same plane to retrace the steps to understand what happened, only the whole is not adding up to the sum of its parts.
“Sometimes records dictate their own personalities and you just have to let them be.” - Bruce Springsteen, on Born in the USA
Bruce Springsteen - “My Love Will Not Let You Down” (Left off Born in the USA)
Like Dylan, Bruce is also known for this. The stuff he throws away has proven to be hits for other artists, or gets added to Greatest Hits, or released as part of the Tracks box set (rumor has it there’s another volume in the works). Springsteen also had so much material from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions, he released The Promise—a fantastic double album of previously unreleased material in 2010. He could very much do the same with material left off of Born in the USA sessions. In There Was Nothing You Could Do, Steven Hyden proposes his own fictional follow-up to Born in the USA made up of various outtakes, which would itself be considered a great album.
My favorite among this batch is “My Love Will Not Let You Down.” It fits the album in theme and tone. Lyrically, it has a little in common with “Dancing in the Dark,” about not being able to fall asleep; a broken relationship like “Bobbie Jean,” and a refusal to give up like “No Surrender.” As with that last song, it also shares that charging drive and anthemic chorus, which may explain why it got the axe. But you could also then argue that the whole spirit of the album is wrapped up in a single song. Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau made that argument, suggesting it follows “Bobby Jean” and kicks off side 2 in a proposed track list (and leaves off “No Surrender”).
You can watch Bruce and the E Street band rip it live as if it were one of the seven other blockbuster hits off of Born in the USA in the 2002 Madison Square Garden special, and those fans treat it as such, and I agree with them.
“We sequenced it on Purple Rain, and he took it off. We sequenced it on Around the World in a Day, and he took it off. We even put it on the Parade album, and he took it off…It was very personal, and I think he just didn’t want people to hear it.” - Susan Rogers (Prince’s engineer)
Prince - “Moonbeam Levels” (Left off 1999 and others)
Prince was also known to shuffle album track lists before release, and he’s even known to scuttle whole albums. Given the amount of known, unreleased work from Prince is out there, ’“Moonbeam Levels” is the tip of a very large iceberg. It was the first Prince track to be released posthumously, as part of the 4Ever greatest hits package. It was originally recorded during the 1999 sessions (in 1982). He later revisited it during the Purple Rain sessions, but always pulled it from release.
In terms of where it would belong on the album, I think it could fit in after the extended funk jam “Automatic,” which fades out with a drum beat and the handclaps from the Linn drum machine that are also featured here. Fun fact about the Linn drum machine, which Prince used frequently: those handclaps are that of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. The machine’s inventor, Roger Linn, had them record a clap for him to use as a sample during an unrelated session. He hard-coded it into the machine.
The song is a tale about a star child in need of a place in the universe to feel happy. I’m unsure what “Moonbeam Levels” actually refers to, but he’s in dire straits and needs some kind of good vibes:
Maybe he would like a nice condo overlookin' the rings of Saturn
Maybe he wants affection instead of a plastic life
Maybe he doesn't know what he wants at all
It’s a fun and catchy pop song until the last 30 seconds or so when the vocal melody leans into a minor chord, and the melancholy pleading in the lyrics is reinforced by the music. It’s easy to miss but really makes the song for me. I almost need to restart the song again and see if it was there all along. Suddenly all the talk of moonbeams and condos on the rings of Saturn dissipates, and the weight of the star child’s sense of mortality brings us back to Earth. He’s human after all. And unfortunately, so was Prince.
“The idea is to make the bare bones of a riff, snap the drums in and see what happens…It was ‘it goes like this’ and see what comes out. And this is when you realize that with a good band, you only really need a little sparkle of an idea, and before the evening’s over it will be a beautiful thing.” - Keith Richards, on the making of Exile on Main Street
Rolling Stones - “Plundered My Soul” (Left off of Exile on Main Street)
In Life, Keith Richards dispels a few myths about the recording of Exile on Main Street in a rented mansion in the south of France. He puts down the idea that it was all parties and drugs, and instead talks about the all-nighters in the studio, that he and Mick would grab any idea they had and running with it, sometimes recording two songs a day.
The quote above sums up the sound of “Plundered My Soul,” an Exile outtake which was finished in 2011 for the 40th anniversary release. It’s a song you can call out any of the elements as a highlight—Mick Taylor’s lead, Mick Jagger’s vampy, soul-man vocal performance, those backing vocals—but I’ve got to give it to Keith and Charlie Watts hitting on the 1 and holding it. The dropped beat hits like the singer’s heart hitting the sidewalk after a lover’s thrown it out the window. That’s what Mick’s singing about, isn’t it?
Exile on Main St. is already overstuffed and sloppy—its subject is excess, pushing the limits, trying to pull oneself together, so this is not a criticism, but an affirmation of its greatness—so I can understand their needing to work with the most complete material and cut back the rest. But the absence of “Plundered My Soul” from Exile speaks volumes about the wealth of material they had at the time. Can you imagine having so much to work with that you can set something like this aside for 40 years?
“The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.” - Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell - “Hunter (the Good Samaritan)” (Left off Blue)
After hearing the confessional and bare masterpiece Blue, Kris Kristofferson famously begged Mitchell, “Oh Joni, save something for yourself.” She did, apparently, and it’s this song, released in 2021 as part of a 50th anniversary edition. It was hardly a secret track, as she was known to play it live often. As pretty much all of Crosby, Stills, and Nash were in love with her, each of them credited that to her talent as a musician. I imagine hearing Joni play a song like “Hunter (the Good Samaritan)” in a sunny living room could have that effect. It’s charming, there’s a bit of mystery to it. But at its heart it is playful and has enough religious allusions to think of it as an old hymn or folk song.
Given the lack of defenses Mitchell described, it makes sense why she left it off the nearly-complete album in favor of three new songs at the last minute. Those three songs: “All I Want,” “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” and “Little Green.” In order, those songs were about her burgeoning romance with James Taylor, an old heartbreak, and a confessional about the daughter she gave up for adoption. Like Jeff Tweedy describing his state while making A Ghost is Born, she had a profound need to put herself out there at that exact moment in that exact way. So instead of this very charming folktale about a drifter at an inn, she swung for the fences. It’s hard to argue with that sense of conviction. If “Hunter (the Good Samaritan)” were to be dropped into Blue (say, after the title track, opening side 2), it would fit right in. It might even lighten the load of the listener. But for an album that feels simultaneously intimate and immediate, as if you’re right there in the room with just her, might it also break that spell? It’s like a friend telling you a Bible story sandwiched between two secrets. But a good story is a good story, and a good song is still just a song. But an album is a work of art. Right?
Thanks for reading. Enjoy the listening.
A final quick final note: A reader asked for a full playlist of all the songs featured here. I’ve put them together and will update them each week. Some songs are only available on YouTube and I’ve done my best to match them with either original versions or substitutions from the same artist. Hopefully these links work as intended. Let me know if not.