Good songs you didn't discover until later by an artist you'd liked when the song was released

Please forgive the inartful phrasing of the thread title. I struggled with a way to word it that wouldn’t be confusing, and probably failed anyway. Moving on.


Though not a huge follower, I had always generally enjoyed the music of Soundgarden/Chris Cornell/Audioslave. When Cornell passed away recently, I set out to put together a short playlist of my favorite songs, and either my wife stumbled upon his version of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” I’d never heard it before, and I was a little put off the first time I heard it, but it grew on me very quickly. And now it’s a regular in my rotation.

Additionally, because of a setting I had accidentally activated on Spotify that starts playing similar songs after a playlist ends, I wound up hearing Ice Cube’s “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It,” for the first time earlier this year, and it became an instant hit for me. The album it appeared on had been released in 2008.

In fairness, I don’t tend to listen to a lot of new music, and I haven’t for many years. I think of myself as being perpetually stuck in the 90s. So I’m probably more susceptible to this phenomenon than most. But have any of the rest of you had the experience of discovering a great song you’d missed years after an artist you’d already liked at the time had released it?

B-sides would be my bane. I was not an obsessive buy everything type of fan for any of my fave artists, so I only ever heard the album cuts. Turns out my fave 80’s band The Church had put a LOT of little gems on their b-sides, but I only got around to hearing them once Youtube came along and their label started putting the b-sides on new editions of their old albums.

These 3 songs (for starters) would have been the best, or one of the best, cuts on the albums they were not originally put on:

As You Will

Life Speeds Up

In This Room

That’s the story of my high school years. I went to high school right as hip hop was getting super-popular (early 2000s), and I didn’t like hip hop, so I looked for alternatives. There was a local eighties station that I began listening to, so the soundtrack to my high school years is Bryan Adams, Don Henley, Roxette – basically the same songs as people ten or fifteen years older than I am!