Back in the 90s it got trendy for a while to include a hidden song at the end of your CD. The last track would actually start with about five minutes of silence, and then the music would suddenly kick in. Sometimes it was a complete song, other times it would just be a fragment or an outtake. Usually it wasn’t listed in the track listings.
I always thought it was stupid. If you weren’t paying attention, the sudden noise was just a cheap jump scare. And if you had a bunch of CDs on random, you got this long silence for no good reason.
Who started this trend – was it Nirvana with Nevermind? – and who thought it was a good idea worth perpetuating?
Ok. How about the X-Files related album Songs In The Key of X? IIRC, it has a hidden track that is actually before the first song on the disc. If you put the CD in a player it started on the first listed song but you could ‘rewind’ to get the hidden track.
@duality72’s Wiki link answered one of my questions:
Nirvana’s song “Endless, Nameless” was included as a hidden track in this way on their 1991 CD Nevermind, after 10 minutes of complete silence within the track listed as the final song.[7][8] Although it was not the first hidden song to use this technique, it gained significant attention.
Cracker’s “Kerosene Hat” (1993) has three hidden tracks: 69, 88, and 99. All the intervening tracks are 4 or 5 seconds. The whole thing was kind of annoying.
Yeah, one of the Tool albums has like 79 tracks (about 68 or so were just a few seconds of silence) that always fucked up my listening enjoyment when using the Pioneer 6-disc changer on ‘Random’. So, as a result, I just quit listening to that album. Who’s clever now, Maynard???
Didn’t know this. I have this CD and will check it out!
The German rock band „Die Ärzte“ had a hidden track before the first song on the album, located in the (usually ignored) pause before track 1. You had to manually rewind the CD to listen to it. Not sure if anyone else has done this. (Their lead singer, Farin Urlaub, replicated this trick on one of his solo albums, and he also released a live album with a running time of close to 90 minutes, well outside of CD specifications.)
In the 90s, I always assumed this was the band’s way of fulfilling some minimum CD length requirement imposed by the label. I remember Nirvana had it and a few other CDs I had in the 90s.
“Oh, it has to be at least 55 minutes long? Ok, here’s our 45 minutes, plus 9 minutes of silence (we play 4’33” twice), then some random thrashing."
ETA, doesn’t one of the Beck albums do that? Odelay? Does anyone know if the LP version of Nevermind have that thrashing at the end?
They were a major pain - especially when ripping to mp3… you think you are getting a 3 minute ballad but you actually get the ballad, two minutes of silence and then a noisy track heavy on percussion (Jesse Cook/Holly Cole “Fragile”). I had to Audacity to split them up.
In 1997, the soundtrack albums for the original Star Wars trilogy were re-released on CD, to coincide with the “Special Editions” of the films being released to theaters. The end of Disc 1 of the original film’s soundtrack has several different takes of the “Star Wars Main Title,” hidden on the last track of the disc, after several minutes of silence when the credited track (an alternate version of “Binary Sunset”) ends.
Hopefully it’s not a hijack to point out there’s a vinyl analog (heh), the double-grooved album. I had one of those, Monty Python’s “Matching Tie and Handkerchief,”
Yeah, on vinyl it might not actually play the hidden track unless you look for it. It can be in a separate grove, or recoreded so far into the record that many players would have autostopped.
I guess the equivalent of that on CD would be to make a hybrid CD with the data in a separate session. Though non-compliant CD players might still try to play the data as audio.
They Might Be Giants’ 1992 album “Apollo 18” had 80-odd song fragments, a couple of seconds long, on individual tracks at the end of the disc. If you set your player to random, you had zillions of possibilities for the order in which you listened to it. No idea why anyone would want that, but then again I’ve never played a CD on random in my life.
Adding tracks in between the actual album end and the bonus tracks wasn’t unheard of: Nine Inch Nails’ “Broken” EP was originally released as a six-track CD with a CD-3 included in the packaging containing two cover songs (one by Adam Ant and one by Pigface). I saw that version of the EP once, as a friend of mine bought it the day of release. In subsequent editions, those two tracks were added to the disc itself, with tracks 7-97, one second long apiece, between the EP and the bonus tracks.
I’d personally prefer that to the “one long track containing two songs at either end” method of record pressing. MIchael Been’s “On The Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough” ends with his gorgeous track “To Feel This Way” then is silent for a while, then there’s another version of the song with a totally different arrangement (oddly, neither one is the version from the film Light Sleeper, which Been scored and where the song first appeared). Which made it a pain in the ass to burn onto a mix CD because you couldn’t just include the music from one version.
Yes, there were a number of different ways of putting hidden songs on a CD. I always had mixed feelings about that kind of thing: I thought they were kind of cool but also kind of annoying.
The practice long preceded my ability to rip CDs, but once I did have that ability, I certainly preferred the methods that allowed me to rip all of the actual songs without added silence.
