In the Jack Nicholson picture “As Good as it Gets”, Danielle Brisebois singing “Everyjthing My Heart Desires” leaks through the soundtrack as atmospheric music in a restaurant scene. Great song, never released as a single, and not even mentioned in the discography in Brfisebois’ Wikipedia page, and barely 100K YouTube hits. But it made enough of an impression on me that I looked it up and put it on my playlist.
Any other examples of good stuff that just got thrown away?Historically, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” was pretty much a throwaway in Swing Time. Astaire just sings it offhandedly and there is no big production or dance number. But the song quickly became a standard.
A few years ago I heard a recently-released outtake / early version of “Wond’ring Aloud”, the short acoustic song off of Aqualung by Jethro Tull. This version was expanded into several verses and was not entirely acoustic, building it up by slowly bringing in more instruments until after one verse, the pace sped up a little bit and the electric guitar came in and the pace got faster and then the electric bass came in and the pace got faster and then … the music abruptly quieted back down. It did not turn into the epic guitar solo that it seemed to be building up to. JT apparently decided that that wasn’t the direction the song should be taking and so never followed up on this experiment.
There’s an atmospheric tune that plays in Blue Velvet when the two are dancing at a friend’s party that I believe was written just for the movie. Never heard it anywhere else.
Based on thread title I thought you meant the vast majority of all vinyl and acetate ever released. I assume plenty of 8 track, cassettes, and CDs have been tossed away also.
However, some of that represents music never recorded in any other form, possibly not even on paper, and gone forever.
It took me a long time to find the music that plays in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the Chicago Museum of Art. It’s an instrumental version of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” by Dream Academy and because there was no soundtrack released for the movie it was hard to find even in the early days of the Internet.
Danielle Brisebois was to have an album called “Portable Life” which contained that song, but the album was pulled last minute for some reason.
However! It is currently available digitally, at least on Amazon, probably on iTunes as well. The final song on the album “Portable Life” is what you are looking for, you can buy the song by itself or get the album, which I highly recommend.
To take your thread title more literally than you perhaps intended:
–Johannes Brahms destroyed some large percentage of his compositions rather than leave them behind after his death (he was something of a perfectionist). He didn’t like them, but audiences today might have begged to differ.
–quite a lot of music from the baroque and early classical periods is simply gone, I believe, including some by the masters. I think Bach composed a St. Mark Passion, and all we have of it today is the libretto.
–Arthur Sullivan’s music for the first Gilbert collaboration, a show called Thespis, no longer exists–except for two songs, one of them published on its own and the other recycled into Pirates of Penzance at the last minute.
Not hard to track down, not overlooked, but just plain gone.
The movie 48 Hours as released in 1982 and was very popular. The group the Busboys did some songs for the movie. One of them was “The Boys Are Back In Town” (not the 1976 song of the same name by Thin Lizzy) which was a catchy song that was written for the movie and got noticed because of it. A lot of people wanted to buy the song after hearing it in the movie.
But inexplicably, the song was not released outside of the movie. The Busboys didn’t include it on one of their albums until 2000 and a soundtrack album for the movie wasn’t released until 2011. (In an ironic note, the first line of the song is “We’ve been waiting for a long time”.)
There is a bluesy/jazzy number that plays at the opening of Clint Eastwood’s film The Gauntlet that is just terrific. I found out it was done by Art Pepper, but have not found it recorded anywhere.
During their 1998 tour, Emerson Lake & Palmer would open their shows with a 2½ minute snippet of a song called “Crossing the Rubicon”, which was planned to be part of a much longer suite on a future album. Unfortunately, the band acrimoniously broke up and never properly reunited (and never will, for obvious reasons); and while parts of the song have appeared in Emerson’s solo work, the original recording was never released in any format and can only be heard on audience bootlegs.
In Star Wars IV, the cantina band is playing a snippet of a second song (kinda like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”) that I’ve never seen available, though I’m not the SW fanatic some people are.
In “Yellowbeard,” in the scene in Portsmouth where they’re walking down the hill, there’s a lovely “sea chanty” music playing in the background.
They finally released “The Yellowbeard Suite” on YouTube. The music is right at 2:00. Charming, friendly, happy little tune!
This is music that almost got thrown away, and it took a good many years of searching before I found it.
ETA: I have no idea whether this is an authorized release or just a typical YouTube bit of piracy. (Heh. Piracy. Yellowbeard. Like as if!)
Of course, I found it after posting.
To take your thread title somewhat less literally than you perhaps intended:
Jethro Tull abandoned and project they were working on in the early 70s (though some of it was tinkered with and included on A Passion Play.
It was ultimately released in the 90s on a collection called “Nightcap.”
It’s awfully good stuff, if you like Tull. Hard to see what they didn’t like about it.
The first Blues Brothers movie was supposed feature more songs at Bob’s Country Bunker. Audio for “Sink the Bismarck” can be found on YouTube.
Even though it’s different from anything else in the movie, I’d say it’s just part of Angelo Badalamenti’s score.
John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats used to run a fan message board, and a handful of people pestered him so incessantly across multiple threads for unreleased material that he deleted the tracks for a 7" called “West Texas Orphans” that he had been about to release to website fans.
Joe Jackson was signed to do the soundtrack for the movie Mike’s Murder. The studio hated everything about the movie, had it recut and stripped off most of Jackson’s songs in favor of a soundtrack by John Berry. They still hated it and barely released it in 1984.
Jackson did release an album of the soundtrack in 1983, with five songs on side A and moody instrumental pieces on side B. A soundtrack of songs not in a movie not yet released did exactly as well as you would think. The album disappeared. No CD was ever released in America although some Russian firm put one out that costs three digits as a collectible.
You can find it streaming and on YouTube. Look it up. It’s the great lost album of the 1980s. All five songs are some of Jackson’s best work. I love the moody instrumentals as well: play them on a system with lots of bass.
Did that have the song “where the hell is MEM-PHIS?” 'Cause I liked that song.