Unreleased Music Found In The Most Unexpected Places

It's the dream of every music fan: More music from a favorite artist. If they haven't released something in years, that's one thing. But if a beloved musician has died, that's quite another. Barring uncanny valley AI shenanigans that make the hackles on your neck rise, you'll never get to hear anything new from a deceased artist. That is, unless you find some secret treasure trove of lost, unreleased tracks tucked away in an attic, hidden under a bread basket, locked in a vault, hanging out in a storage unit, or even just hiding in plain sight.

Fictional as it sounds, all those scenarios have happened over the years. Folks have come across lost music from life-defining artists like the Beatles, Prince, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Queen, and more. Not only does such music exist and keep getting found, but each discovery comes equipped with a unique story stranger than the last. 

It's important to remember that older musicians recorded stuff on tape in the pre-digital days when things could get much more easily lost and weren't so easily copied. That's much less likely in a modern age of instant, 24/7 video and audio recording. And to be honest: It's big name artists that folks are going to be on the lookout for, especially ones whose voices we'll never again hear. Even only one discovered track begs the question: "How much more of this stuff is out there?" There's no way to know, and many reasons to hope.

Let's be honest: There isn't a band that's been more influential over the entirety of modern music than the Beatles. Some folks are going to blurt, "Yeah, yeah, but what about — " and cite some obscure musician who's supposedly the secret true architect of everything. Others will natter about how this or that guitarist pioneered some fingerstyle method that influenced generation (which may be true) or try to downplay the Beatles' talent. In the end, discovering unreleased Beatles music would be like uncovering the musical holy grail — if that grail spoke in a Liverpool accent.

This is exactly what happened in 2004 when an elderly Suffolk man, Vernon Warburton, found a secret Beatles tape in his attic that had gone unnoticed for about 34 years. Why did it take them so long to find it?  "There is so much stuff in the attic that I worry sometimes it will fall through into the living room floor," his wife Joan told the East Anglian Daily Times.

In the 1970s, Warbuton used to own a pub in Holloway, London, where he played advertisement tapes in between music. He thinks that the guy who supplied them probably gave him the Beatles tape by mistake. The 30-minute, 18-song recording contains a Beatles rehearsal full of laughter, banter, and unreleased versions of "I Feel Fine" and "I'm A Loser." "I am really thrilled to own such a marvellous piece of memorabilia," Warburton told the East Anglian Daily Times. He later auctioned the tape for £10,000.

Could there be a man more entangled with his mythical public persona than Prince? The Purple One strode spangled across the stage to decades of rapturous crowds, wowing everyone with showmanship and flair matched only by musicianship and dedication to his craft. Prince was absolutely obsessive when it came to writing and recording, releasing 39 full-length studio albums across 38 years. From his 1978 debut to his death in 2016, he sold over 150 million records in the process. And as Esquire rightly points out, there was something deeply inspirational about Prince. His music drove entire generations of performers, from Alicia Keys to D'Angelo and from Kendrick Lamar to Lizzo. 

So is it possible that such a prolific artist could have left 70% of his work behind when he died in 2016? Hundreds of songs? Thousands? Enough music to "release a new album every year for the next century," as the Grammy Awards says? Thus were the rumors when Bremer Trust, the company responsible for his estate, quite literally drilled into a secret vault in Prince's house in 2016. He left behind no combination for it, no will, and no instructions for what to do with anything of his.

By 2021, Prince's sister Tyka Nelson had taken over his estate, including the unreleased music in the vault. She's since released entire posthumous Prince albums like 2021's "Welcome 2 America." But if there really are thousands of songs in his vault, there's a lot more to come.

A visionary, chameleonic, irreplaceable musician, all-around virtuosic artist, and possible alien, David Bowie left behind a massive hole when he died in 2016. Bowie was more than just a dude on a stage with a guitar (no disrespect meant to those folks) — he was an icon of fashion, visual art, music, acting, and self-expression rolled into one. From 1972's "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" to 2016's "Blackstar," Bowie shifted right along with the times, rediscovered, reinventing, and reinspiring entire generations along the way.

So how bananas would it be to discover Bowie's very first 1963 demo in a bread basket belonging to someone's grandfather? Yes, it's true. David Hadfield, one of the Konrads along with a 16-year-old Bowie (who was still using his birth name David Jones at the time), found the demo along with "booking forms, photographs, promotional sketches, letters and bills" in a loft in his grandfather's garage in 2018, as The Guardian reports. 

The demo features Bowie taking on the role of singer for the Konrads for an audition for Decca Records. Their label rejected Bowie's bid and eventually, Hadfield became the group's singer. "There is no other recording of the demo featuring David [Bowie] as lead [of the Konrads] in existence," Hadfield said. This isn't the only time folks have discovered lost Bowie music. 2021 saw the unreleased tracks "Karma Man" and "Silly Boy Blue" see the light on Bowie's lost 2001 album, "Toy."

If you answered "Freddie Mercury" to the question, "Who is the greatest frontman of all time?," some people might disagree, but not many. Mercury's 1985 legendary Live Aid performance alone is enough to inaugurate him into the hallowed halls of godly performers. And that's not even counting his songwriting credentials, which includes "We Are the Champions," "Bohemian Rhapsody, and more." But with other Queen members writing and playing colossal hits like, "We Will Rock You" and "Another One Bites the Dust," the entirety of Queen deserves credit for every bit of the band's success.

But it's Mercury who stood out as rock's most potent frontman back before he died in 1991, and it's him who stands out in one of Queen's previously unreleased tracks, "Face it Alone." Finally released in 2022, the song sat untouched for decades. In an interview with BBC Radio 2, Queen drummer Roger Taylor described it as "a very passionate piece," and guitarist Brian May called it "beautiful" and "touching." "Face it Alone" was found in the most easily overlooked places: Right in plain sight. And it was written by Mercury.

Neither Taylor or May or anyone else has gone into detail about where exactly the track was. "We looked at it many times and thought, oh no, we can't really rescue that," May said. "But in fact, we went in there again and our wonderful engineering team went, 'OK, we can do this and this.'" Now thanks to everyone's efforts, we've got a lovely new posthumous tribute to Mercury.

Finally, we come to a very recent discovery of unreleased music from none other than the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson. He is one of the biggest( if not biggest) and most recognizable megastars in music history — and we mean globally. Having sold over 343 million records across his 37-year solo career from 1972 to 2009, Jackson is known in practically every corner of the world. With hits like "Bad," "Beat It," "Thriller," "Billie Jean," "Smooth Criminal," etc., he's got nothing left to prove when it comes to songwriting credentials. And we say songwriting credentials because Jackson wrote most of his own music, including many of those hits — over 150. 

The cache of unreleased Jackson songs was discovered in a storage unit in California. As The Hollywood Reporter explains, 56-year-old "former California Highway Patrol officer turned stay-at-home dad" Gregg Musgrove inherited it from someone who said it belonged to singer and producer Bryan Loren. According to Musgrove's inventory list, he is now the proud owner of 15 Jackson songs across 16 cassettes, some of which are complete, some of which are duos with Loren, one of which is a Jackson rap with LL Cool J, and more.

Strangely enough, Musgrove said that the Jackson estate doesn't want the music, and they told The Hollywood Reporter that they already have master cuts of each track. That leaves Musgrove with an obvious option: the auction house. Interested parties beware: You might be able to get your hands on unheard Jackson songs sooner than you think.