In light of the recent Beatles box set releases, a friend and I were chatting about Let It Be Naked.
I personally really like the album, and I’m curious if anybody is aware of any other artists doing something similar. For anybody unfamiliar, Let It Be Naked isn’t just a remaster, they significantly altered the production of the tracks, using different takes, removing some of the instrumentation and backing vocals, juggling the track order, and excising some songs entirely.
So, I guess the question is: are there any other artists who’ve rereleased albums with substantial, intentional changes? I suppose rerecordings would count, although I don’t think I’d include albums that were remixed by an outside artist.
In 2004, Twisted Sister completely reworked their 1984 album “Stay Hungry.” Unhappy with the production of the original album, they produced the new one themselves, re-recording their old songs and adding seven more new ones. It was released under the title “Still Hungry.”
It’ll be much harder to find whole albums like that, but there are lots of artists who considerably rework their own songs.
Dirty Vegas, for instance, has a techno(ish) version of Days Go By, as well as an acoustic.
Bright Eyes has a song called When the Curious Girl Realizes She’s Under Glass which on the album is only a piano and vocals, but on a single contains a full band.
Wilco’s documentary I am Trying to Break Your Heart features alternate versions of songs such as Kamera and Monday.
The Smashing Pumpkins do alternate versions of Try, Try, Try and Heavy Metal Machine, both songs from their album Machina, on the download only Machina 2.
I hope I didn’t just hijack anything; I love this sort of thing. It really lets you see how the artist envisions the song, which may be completely different than what the average listener picks up on.
No updated album releases but Steely Dan, in its current touring mode for the last several years, has reworked its catalog quite a bit. Instrumentation, keys and solos have changed along with Fagen’s voice and the result is fabulous. The songs seem to sound very much like the old ones until you listen to one of the old ones and compare it to the new, and the result is that the songs sound new and fresh and, dare I say it, even better in some ways. It’s funny, but I find myself liking both versions just about equally as well. The old songs sound great just like I remember them, and the new ones have little twists and turns that make them great too.
I’m really looking forward to the time when I can see those guys live.
Frank Zappa was notorious for re-writing, re-recording, re-mixing, re-mastering his material.
I bought the original Rykodisc pressing of We’re Only In It For The Money/Lumpy Gravy when it was released. Years later Ryko released the albums on their own discs, so I bought those also. Except that by then Frank had completely re-worked both albums. I was freakin’ pissed.
So I did what any good mutant would do: I called 818-PUMPKIN to see what the deal was and express my dissatisfaction (I wasn’t aware that Frank did this kind of thing at the time, and I felt ripped off). Well, the guy who answered the phone listened to me bitch for 3 or 4 minutes and when I finally went to catch my breath after saying “dude, wtf?” he explained that Frank had spent the last few years of his life “fixing” things in old recordings, including new arrangements and adding new parts and solos and removing things, etc. He told me to just give the new stuff a listen and try and look at it as new material, not re-worked old material and see if I couldn’t see where Frank was coming from. I told him I’d try, and then asked him who I was talking to.
It was Dweezil.
I’ve never liked the newer versions much, but it was cool that Dweezil was answering the phone and explaining his old man’s actions. And I respect Frank enough to acknowledge that it’s his right to do what he did, although I disagree with him about the necessity or the quality of the result.
Yeah, I was limiting it to albums because I could think of quite a few individual songs, so that list would probably grow too quickly. I think there’s something more interesting about reworking a whole album or, at least, set of songs, especially for artists where their “artistic unit” is the album more than the song.
I think it’d be fair to include NEW albums entirely composed of reworkings of older songs, like the mentioned Todd Rundgren Bossa Nova album or Cyndi Lauper’s The Body Accoustic (all stripped-down reworkings of her earlier hits). Obviously live albums don’t count, 'cause that’s cheating.
Loudon Wainwright III recently released Recovery, an album consisting solely of remakes of his earlier songs. It’s interesting to see how differently he interprets them after 30+ years. The songs are very similar, but time has changed their meaning to him and the way he sings them.
You’ve got it backwards: the first version you had, on the 1987 twofer CD, was the one with the drastically remixed We’re Only In It For The Money featuring newly recorded bass and drum tracks. The 1995 individual CD release was the original recording from the 1967.
The next album, Cruising With Ruben And The Jets, was given the same remix/new rhythm tracks treatment in the '80s, and to this day that’s the only version that has been issued on CD.
Erasure released Union Street a couple of years ago. In it, they took some of their lesser known songs and reworked them into acoustic and sometimes country-ish arrangements. They then went on tour for that album and later released a live album that included some of their more well-known material in that style.
John Mayall drastically reworked his 1971 Back to the Roots album for the Archive to Eighties CD, dropping some tracks, and remixing and partially re-recording others. The original version was subsequently issued as a double CD, with the remixes added as a bonus.
Mike Oldfield has released at least five versions of his 1973 instrumental rock composition Tubular Bells. There’s the original, the orchestral version, a remixed and remastered version produced for the ‘Boxed’ compilation set in 1976, Tubular Bells 2003 (a completely new note-for-note recording) and Tubular Bells 2008 (sometimes listed as TB 2009) which is another complete re-recording, note for note, released as part of an ‘Ultimate Edition’ compilation that includes the original and some other related material.
This list does not involve some minor remixes that were released separately, nor does it include the ‘thematically related’ albums called TB II, TB III and The Millenium Bell, which do consist of new and different material albeit with many frequent nods back to the original 1973 work.
In a slight parallel to Ridley Scott’s Director’s Cut of Blade Runner, Vangelis reworked the soundtrack on a later album. Although in that case there wasn’t any official original soundtrack release to go back to. The album also contains songs that weren’t included in the movie.