Which album has the longest silent period between the final track and a hidden bonus track?
I wonder if this is even possible to answer. My Google Fu however may be weak.
Are we only counting actual songs? There are lots of albums where the “hidden track” is disorganized noise/jamming, studio chatter, a soliloquy, or something else that could not reasonably be considered a “song.”
I don’t know the time, but there’s at least a couple of minutes between “Friend of Mine” and “Mile High” on John Hiatt’s “Walk On” album.
On the NIN album/EP “Broken” it was pretty long. The actual tracks was #99 on the disc, IIRC.
I recall a CD that had something like 11 tracks, with tracks 12-98 a minimum length, and the hidden track on 99. Cake? Korn? I think it was the same album as Euro Trash Girl…
No, count whatever you like.
Dunno. The longest I can think of on an album that I own would be the gap from 4:55 to 5:33 on the Cowboy Junkies album Miles From Our Home - separating Those Final Feet from the hidden track, At the End of the Rainbow. The hidden track is a full bona-fide song of 4 minutes duration, so should pass any reasonableness test. 48 seconds.
Of less serious hidden tracks, Islands by King Crimson had silence between 9:12 and 10:15 of the the track Islands, before a mess of studio chatter and a count in. Apparently this hidden track is extended a bit in a later remix, but whether the silence interval is the same I don’t know.
63 seconds.
Both of these are the final tracks on the album, so work properly as hidden tracks.
It is a difficult semantic question on a CD - if the track has a separate track ID number, maybe it can’t be considered hidden. Even if the preceding track includes a significant gap of silence.
The hidden track on Nirvana’s Nevermind starts about 10 minutes after the end of “Something in the Way,” and not all pressings of the album included it.
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I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking of, but Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, after the last song, has 82 silent 4-second tracks and a song on track 99 (referred to as “Better Messiah,” “Dying Years,” “Minister,” “Empty Sounds of Hate,” or “Untitled”).
Since this is about albums, let’s move it to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
So it’s not 4’ 33"?
This Wikipedia page gives the pause before the Nirvana track at exactly ten minutes, the adds:
“The X-Files: The Album, features a hidden track at 10 minutes and 13 seconds into the final track. The track consists of series creator Chris Carter explaining the series mythology and meaning behind the alien conspiracy. The hidden track even includes spoilers and minute details in the show’s overall plot that had not yet been resolved on the show itself when the album was released.”
The wording there suggests that 10m 13s period is measured not from the end of the previous track, as a pause would have to be, but from the beginning of the previous track. Unless that penultimate track was shorter than 13 seconds (which seems unlikely), I’d say Nirvana’s silence is still the one to beat.
I guess there were lots of those track 99s around the mid-90s when CDs were huge (and “hidden” tracks were popular). Tool’s Undertow had a good one, with that added twist that there was something like almost 10 minutes of nighttime sounds (mostly silence, and soft cricket chirping) in it. The “hidden-ness” of these tracks was kind of spoiled on CDs, because despite sticking them all the way on track 99, it still only took most players maybe a few extra seconds to skip all those empty tracks. The 10 minutes of mostly silence was a pretty sweet addition here; if you noticed and were impatient, you’d have to seek through the track (not as convenient as just skipping to the next one), OR, you’d just forget the player was running and it would scare the shit out of you when it came back (which happened to more than a few friends of mine on that particular track). - YouTube
And sometimes the hidden track was just an extra-long last track (which worked better, IMO, because it didn’t give it away if your player showed the total number of tracks on the CD, and it forced you to either sit through the silence or FFW/seek).
I think the “hidden” track was maybe a bigger deal in the cassette era, because it really was an easter egg; a lucky find or knowledge that would be passed from friend to friend. On side 2, when the last song ends, you usually fast forward to the end so the tape auto-flips (if you’ve got a fancy deck) or you ff/flip or flip/rew. The only way to find a hidden track would be to actually listen all the way to the end of the tape (easy if you forgot about it and just let it play), or listen to the first song or so and then flip to the second side for some reason. I think my copy of Pearl Jam’s Ten had that little weird thing all the way at the end of side 2 (like an extended version of the intro to Once. It seemed like there were some that I actually liked, too, but I can’t remember which ones. It seemed like some I would listen to the first song or two and then flip for the hidden track (so I would have to FFW so much). Maybe I had NIN’s Broken on cassette. I seem to remember I really liked the extra tracks on that one, and the first two songs as well, better than the others.
Can’t really hide anything on iTunes or Spotify…if the track listing doesn’t give it away the last track having an absurd length will, and that’s annoying because if the last song is a good one you don’t want to put it in your shuffle rotation (ie “Release” from the aforementioned Ten is burdened with that hidden doodly bit after a few minutes of silence).
An aside, as this wasn’t the longest hidden song silence that the OP is looking for, but the song Euro-Trash Girl WAS the hidden track (#69, of course) on Cracker’s album ‘Kerosene Hat’.
Kerosene Hat also had hidden tracks 88 (I Ride My Bike) and 99 (Kerosene Hat outtake). The empty tracks in between are either 4, 5, or 6 seconds long.
Early copies of the NIN’s Broken put the two “hidden tracks” on a 3" mini CD rather than on tracks 98 and 99.
Some versions of David Gray’s White Ladder have a hidden song before the first song. You have to rewind the first song to get to it. It starts at something like -03:15. If you simply play the CD from beginning to end you will never hear this song. It’s truly hidden.
X-Files, Songs in the key of X also did this, 2 hidden tracks at the beginning.
It’s not a “hidden” track (it’s listed on the liner), but I played Abbey Road (on vinyl) a half-dozen times before I ever heard “Her Majesty”. I kept picking up the needle during the pause.
Nirvana was going to be my answer.
The Our Lady Peace album Spiritual Machines, has a “hidden” bit on the last track. “The Wonderful Future” runs 4:30, followed by ~12 minutes of silence, followed by the last Ray Kurzweil bit. The entire track runs 20 minutes long.
-DF