Secret Songs on CDs: The Lost Art of Hidden Tracks

[@Rll_2206]

If you have the CD version of Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf, there is a hidden track before track 1 titled "The Real Song for the Deaf". The song is literally a bassy drone.

[@arock1024]

"huh? what?"

[@MaadXXX]

Is that also the one that has a video file of Dave Grohl pretending to be drunk and talking about how he was in Nirvana?

[@leviathan_is_me]

​@@arock1024 👏

[@gianalfredo]

CDs with 99 tracks, with some or only the last one being a song. This made it impossible to play the album on shuffle on my Sony anti skip Walkman.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

yeah, i could see that being a pain in the ass

[@punknerd9747]

The only album that I can think of with more than 99 songs is Short Music for Short People

[@MrCollectorOriginal]

​@@punknerd9747 Love your Profile Pic!!

[@gianalfredo]

@@punknerd9747 I remember MM’s Antichrist Superstar and Overkill’s W.F.O.

[@tristanraine]

Broken by Nine Inch Nails had this, 4 seconds of silence with 98 and 99 being Physical and Suck Nvm this is mentioned in the video WHOOPS

[@SpazTac13]

I had heard that the 12 tracks of silence on Korn's "Follow the Leader" was to have 60 seconds of silence for Justin, a kid who's dying wish was to meet the band.

[@tylerbrittan593]

Yup! And Korn has a bunch of hidden tracks on multiple albums.

[@ajoylesseuphoria5900]

You are correct

[@RobertQuant]

Yes I have all Korn cds 💿 😊

[@stinghouseproductions8502]

Sixteen dollars for a CD? Man, I remember them being almost twenty. I went to buy Metallica's Ride the Lightening when I was a teenager in the late 90's and it was almost twenty dollars...for an album that was already considered old then. Something Lars never really talks about if Napster gets brought up in interviews is just how hard it was to pull money together for even a single album back then if you were a kid.

[@HiGlowie]

Sam Goody was the worst offender of this. Borders wasn’t any better

[@DancingwithGhosts]

Best Buy was where I usually went and their prices ranged from $12-16 depending on how hot the album was or wasn't

[@DancingwithGhosts]

i bought the rare "Daft Punk Alive 1997" from Walmart in the mid 2000's

[@mtwice4586]

@@DancingwithGhosts Yeah, Best Buy was the Mecca for CDs. I listen to a lot of death metal and black metal, and surprisingly Best Buy had a pretty good selection. No other big name stores carried underground music.

[@RobertQuant]

And know all those cds 💿 are released again in remaster forms

[@PCFROMVCS]

My favorite way to discover hidden tracks was falling asleep to an album and being woken up by a new song mid dream. And then wondering if its real for a second, or if youre still asleep

[@maybefaith23]

My friend once told me about how he fell asleep after finishing Radiohead's Kid A, waking up to the hidden track "Untitled," and it's ambience making him think he'd died and woken up in purgatory lmao

[@PCFROMVCS]

@@maybefaith23 I woke up to the Dookie hidden track and I thought someone was playing a prank on me or something when I first heard it lol

[@simbakissa8659]

Speaking of Kid A, the first 100 000 or something copies have a hidden booklet.

[@jumbyrocks]

Omg that happened to me with one of the NIN cds. Freaked my the fuck out!

[@jongilbertson2106]

Disturbed used pregap space on The Sickness album. It contains an intro to the next song. It was just before Down With The Sickness.

[@baron_von_brunk]

Born in 1984 here, so you were probably just starting high school around the time I was graduating. I absolutely remember getting a new CD and being disappointed on how most of the tracks were bad, or at least not up to our expectations. I was in my early teens in the latter half of the '90s, and distinctly recall my friends and I really liking certain one-hit-wonder rock songs that we heard off 105.7 The Edge or saw on MTV, and then bought the albums with our paper route money. Bands like Chumbawumba, Marcy Playground, Butthole Surfers, and Cake fell into the camp of bands where we enjoyed maybe 1-2 songs max, but didn't care for the rest of the album.

[@HiGlowie]

I think Creepy Crawling on Tub Thumping was far better than the “I GET KNOCKED DOWN” song.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

yeah marcy playground and butthole surfers are perfect examples of bands CD's that i would have bought if i had liked just ONE more song than their hit since i identified them as ''alternative bands'' and that was\is my jam. But I just never heard anything else by them to justify me spending my 15 bucks on the CD. CAKE however is amazing and I own pretty much all their stuff and love it.

[@alessandrobaggi6129]

​@@DancingwithGhostsFriendly reminder that apostrophe+S is a possessive and not a plural... It should have been "CDs" 😉

[@ositox5659]

Dude, the King Missile album Happy Hour, where the song Detachable 🥒 came from, is a pretty crazy album. Worth a listen to at least once. CAKE rocks! Especially Comfort Eagle.

[@Areala21]

My friends and I had just finished listening to Weird Al's "Off the Deep End" CD one afternoon, but nobody got up to hit stop, so the CD just kept going, running for something like an extra 11 minutes on the last track. All of a sudden, ten minutes after we thought the album ended, there was this burst of noise: instruments crashing, drums and cymbals being beaten haphazardly, and Al yelling incoherently into the microphone for a few seconds. Scared the absolute bejeezus out of us, because it came out of nowhere, and we had no idea. Yeah, he parodied Nirvana so hard with that album that he included his own "Endless Nameless"-style hidden track at the end of it. :) But the award for the greatest one of these has got to go to Monty Python, whose comedy LP "Matching Tie and Handkerchief" was double-grooved on one side. Depending on where you dropped the needle, you could have gotten the side which was advertised on the sleeve, or you could have gotten an entirely different set of sketches which were not advertised at all. These clever wankers hid AN ENTIRE THIRD SIDE OF A RECORD on an LP. :)

[@DancingwithGhosts]

long live Weird Al one of my all time earliest inspirations

[@Solitaire001]

From what I understand, the reason "Her Majesty" was tacked on at the end of "Abbey Road" is that there was a standing order to not throw away any Beatles recordings. Due to that order the Engineer put the song at the end of the album. [Added] Paul McCartney heard it and liked it there, so there it stayed. BTW, on the album "As Time Goes By" by the Carpenters there's a gap of silence (about 20 seconds per Disclogs) after the last-listed track followed by the hidden track "And When He Smiles", a live performance from a TV show. On the Japanese version of the album the track is not listed in the track list but is mentioned as a hidden track in the liner notes. However, on the later-released U. S. version the track is listed as a [Hidden] track.

[@patrickreichert1442]

the fact that you ended the video with a hidden track is perfect

[@john-evanbear8783]

One of my favourite hidden tracks is Damone by Deftones from their sophomore album Around the Fur. The listed track MX is five minutes long but it is followed by 14 minutes of silence and then you hear a voicemail message of somebody smoking a bong. Then it is followed by 13 minutes of more silence until the drums for Damone kick in. The song actually startles me every time it comes on because I forget that I am listening to an album, but is is a kick ass song that is nearly five minutes long. So the total length of the last song with the hidden track is 37 minutes, taking up half the length of the album.

[@laurisaarinen1126]

I love and hate that one... I love the song, but i hate how long it takes to get there. Also i have tried to extract an mp3 file of it over and over again and it always screws up the audio for whatever reason, making the sound crack in places. I can only assume it's because of the long silence as the album has no scratches.

[@porkboy23]

I have the distinct memory of the X-files tv show soundtrack where the liner notes announce that Nick Cave would like you to know about Track 0. You have to rewind on the first song for about 10 minutes to find it though. The band 311 had their instrumental entrance music on the negative space before Transistor starts. Some CD players weren't supposed to be able to rewind into the negative on the 1st track. 311 eventually released the song on a proper track on their B-sides box set.

[@TheJMaqExperience]

They Might Be Giants did the same thing with a one-minute song called Token Back to Brooklyn, from the album Factory Showroom. The song is ethereal and dreamlike, and rewinding to hear it back in the late ‘90s felt like accessing secret knowledge.

[@EHiggins]

Back in the day if I saw Beck's Odelay in the CD Jukeboxes I always played the hidden track and waited.

[@Michael-ue3dm]

The hidden track on Mutations is one my favorite Beck songs.

[@kc9715]

I remember I used to annoy the hell outta my parents w/ the hidden noise track from Mellow Gold. 😂

[@8thFurno]

I’m Gen Z with Gen X parents. And I love collecting CDs, I’ve even “borrowed” some of theirs, it’s the perfect blend of the physical and the digital. And I always love it when I pick up an album I’ve never listened to before has a hidden track or two at the end. It’s like a little Easter Egg for those who listen to the album all the way through.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

that's awesome dude, keep collecting physical media alive!

[@erinw6120]

CDs can hide loads of stuff. Information Society "hid" a text file detailing wild adventure in Brazil in the last track of their 1992 album "Peace and Love, Incorporated". Track is titled "300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or Ascii Download)", and is three minutes of "modem noise". If the audio output is decoded through a computer, you get the file. CDs not only had hidden tracks, some had hidden graphics. The 1989(!) release of "The Breathtaking Blue" by German group Alphaville included images and lyrics for every song, only accessible when played in something like a karaoke machine or video game console that supported CD+G, like the Sega Saturn, TurboGrafx CD, Atari Jaguar, or 3DO.

[@laborlart]

Speaking of pregaps, there are also those where you had to manually rewind from track 1 to reach a hidden track 0. An example I know was "Me White Noise (Darklife)" featuring Phil Daniels on Blur's 2003 album "Think Tank".

[@DSPsWifesBF]

I remember getting the Gorillaz self titled album and being so disappointed that every song didn’t sound like Clint Eastwood. Now it’s one of my favorite albums.

[@gdkey8025]

at the time, on radio 1 in the UK they almost always played the garage remix, and almost never mentioned that the singer was Damon Albarn, same goes to 19/2000 they always played the faster one.

[@DSPsWifesBF]

@@gdkey8025I listened to the garage remix and I liked it until the they replaced Del the Funky Homosapien with some shitty garage Mc

[@DancingwithGhosts]

hah yeah i can see that.. clint eastwood had such a unique sound even still today, that i could see being disappointed that every song didn't sound like that.. I wonder how many Radiohead fans felt that way about Pablo Honey

[@gdkey8025]

@@DancingwithGhosts when i bought their catalogue in 2005/6 Pablo Honey is the only one i played once and once only. You is ok and creep but the rest.... yikes

[@immortaluglyfish2724]

I miss the gloomy, angsty yet still goofy sound of the first Gorillaz album. I wish they'd go back to that sound.

[@Vitorio582]

Being born in 2003 and living in a small town, during my childhood/pre-teens I kind of experienced the transition of the physical era to the digital era. It was really sad to see the place I used to go to rent DVDs almost every friday being more and more abandoned over the years

[@briansthingsthatarecool]

As an Elvis fan the earliest example I’ve heard was from his 1971 album Elvis Country. Elvis himself had the idea to take one song “I was born 10,000 years ago” and hack it up and weave snippets of it between songs (utilizing that dead space). It’s kind of weird. Most CD versions take it out. Another one that comes to mind is Weird Al’s “Off The Deep End”. After a few minutes of silence after the final track it’s just Al screaming his head off.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

hah yeah "bite me", that was supposed to be mocking Nirvana's "Endless Nameless", Weird Al was so ahead of the curve

[@BenjaminNixon]

That reminds me of They Might be Giant's Apollo 18 album, the tracklist on the back contains 18 songs, but the last song is track 38, and the previous track "Fingertips" is track 17. Turns out Fingertips is a series of 21 5-30 songs, and the intended way to listen to CD was on random so that the mini songs would be spread out throughout the play order.

[@joshtoten]

@@BenjaminNixon Streaming ruined Fingertips. :( If you put the CD version of Apollo 18 on shuffle you could get one of the random fingertips between proper songs and it felt MAGICAL!

[@BenjaminNixon]

@@joshtoten I had no idea, so I just checked one of the streaming apps on my phone, NetEase Cloud Music. It has two versions of Apollo 18. The one dated March 24 1992 has all the fingertips compiled into one track. The other one, dated August 17 2010, is the classic 38-track version with 21 separate fingertips.

[@VahanNisanian]

I have the original pressing of McCartney's 𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘙𝘢𝘪𝘯 album. 𝘍𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘰𝘮 is tucked away as an unlisted track right after 𝘙𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘴.

[@cf20936]

Great video, my favorite hidden track is They Might Be Giants' "Token Back to Brooklyn", off their Factory Showroom album. What makes it stand out so much is that the song was placed into the pre-gap of track 1, making it only possible to hear by rewinding the CD from the very beginning. Guitarist John Flansburgh used this method again on his second solo album, with the track being a text-to-speech narrated story about a person who is trapped in the pre-gap.

[@btr3k]

Someone would really want to hide something to put it in the pre-gap of track 1. Who thinks to rewind from the beginning of the CD? From what I understand, some CD players aren't even able to do it! But, there are quite a lot of CDs featuring the trick - even a Wikipedia page about it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_albums_with_tracks_hidden_in_the_pregap

[@Dariothehungry]

I kind of miss this era.

[@JosephBlack]

same

[@DancingwithGhosts]

oh i def do

[@OcpCommunications]

I honestly didn't even know hidden tracks on CDs were common so this video was really interesting. Great job as usual.

[@BKopps]

remember AFI having numerous hidden tracks across some of their earlier albums. loved those ones.

[@tommymartinelli6043]

On Danzig 4 there is a Hidden Track called “Invocation”. There are all these silent tracks between track 12 “Let it Be Captured” going to track 66 which is “Invocation

[@ScottCrippen]

Tom Petty included a short track on his 'Full Moon Fever' solo album CD where he gives respect to tape and record buyers as they would have to flip them for side 2. It's a short, but funny inclusion.

[@raeganj6744]

On Spotify it plays at the end of Runnin’ Down a Dream instead of being a separate track. I was surprised it was included, I would’ve expected them to just leave that off the digital version

[@ta7sint]

I remember a Public Enemy having a hidden intro when you rewinded further than 0:00 and the CD player showed the time with a minus like -1:23, i think it was the Muse Sick in our Mess Age album and i was really blown away how it was possible. But you had to actively rewind to find that

[@jamesness9542]

My favourite hidden track is from the Misfits, 1997 Album American Psycho . A song called : Hell Night 🤘🏼

[@patrickreeves4650]

that song was bad ass

[@beingsupersonic7499]

One of the most unique secret tracks I’ve ever come across is on the album “1977” by Irish indie rockers Ash. You have to press rewind on track 1 to access it!

[@Eric_Hunt194]

On the version I had, it was tacked onto the end of the final song, in the same track after about eight minutes of silence.

[@RealBarefootIsLegal]

REM's album "Green" that has a hidden track... and also the 1st She Wants Revenge album.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

oh god yess that hidden track on Green is so good i forgot all about that one

[@future2097]

I was born in 1990. Hidden tracks were something special to me. My first hidden track that I heard was the alarm bell sound effect that closes out on U2's "Zooropa" album after the final track "The Wanderer (featuring Johnny Cash)". It creeped me out when I was a child.

[@clemens83]

311’s best album Transistor has a super cool instrumental intro before the first track, so you have to rewind from track 1 to hear it

[@HiGlowie]

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals had certain things you could only see if you put the blueish jewel case over the album art booklet

[@DancingwithGhosts]

love that kind of unique, yet bygone, packaging... just giving fans something a little extra

[@SASTSimon]

On justice’s audio video disco from 2011 they had the hidden track presence at the end On streaming services it was replaced by including the 17 minute track ”planisphere” as a bonus track but the original hidden track is still on streaming as a b-side on the helix single

[@TDM1165]

I can remember being in a pub back in the 90’s and my friend putting on come on by the verve on the jukebox, the final track on urban hymns, and then it finished, followed by silence and loads of people wondering why there songs aren’t coming on…maybe something to do with the 10 minutes of silence that follows the track for one 2 minute inconsequential instrumental. This was the kind of annoying shit that bands were way to fond of in the 90’s, the CD format has a lot to answer for - bloated album length for one thing. That smashing pumpkins double album, ML & the infinite sadness, is impressive as all hell but it’s way too long, the restrictions of vinyl kept folk honest if you ask me.

[@austindolan7182]

slipknot's first album features the band watching scat porn and having chocolate pudding ruined for them. then they do another song. also rob zombie ends sinister urge with unholy 2.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

was this audio or video 😳

[@austindolan7182]

@@DancingwithGhosts would've been so cool if it was video. sadly it's just shitty 1999 audio.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

@@austindolan7182 i think i might be glad it's only audio :0

[@roberttackaberry4231]

Stone Temple Pilots sophomore album Purple contains a secret track immediately following the last song. I believe this track is called "12 Gracious Melodies." It's kinda cool and I've always included it when listening to that fantastic album.

[@johnnykarate_SweepLeg]

My first hidden track experience was "All By Myself" from Green Day DOOKIE, in 1994.

[@IanVase]

Those were the days. Favs.....Slipknot - Eeyore, Deftones - Damone

[@kyliepollert8341]

Thank you very much for making this video! I'm a Millennial as well and a huge country music fan, so the first hidden track I discovered was from buying Keith Urban's "Golden Road" album in 2002. 2 minutes after "You're Not My God", there was a humorous hidden track called "One Chord Song", which he wrote using one chord on his acoustic guitar; the song itself is only 2 minutes long.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

interesting.. i never imagined country artists to be artsy fartsy enough to want to bother with hidden tracks but good for the Urbmeister!

[@btr3k]

Buying CDs was fun - having a used CD shop nearby was where I spent many hours flipping through racks of them. And, trying to figure out the best way to get rid of the price sticker. Anyway, Information Society probably had the best hidden stuff on their CDs (though actually, I never bought any of their albums - oops) I think one of their albums was in CD+G format if you had the right type of player. Others had some encoded noise that could be run through a modem to obtain messages or files.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

I also hated trying to cleanly remove the adhesive and then I discovered the glory that is Goo Gone. CD+G is usually always a karaoke file meaning a karaoke player would have the words on the screen with the music

[@btr3k]

@@DancingwithGhosts I actually never used Goo Gone, I just rubbed it a bunch like a dummy. Anyway, diving down the rabbit hole a bit, but I won the Sega CD from a contest in the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly (high score on Genesis Stormlord of all things). One of the pack-ins was a "Rock Paintings" CD+G with a variety of songs, I remember the Information Society ones from there. It does indeed have a karaoke crawl, but also lots of other totally random stuff. Of course it's on KZbin: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nZ68gYSnbK-We8k

[@erinw6120]

@@btr3k I remember popping the InSoc CD into my TurboGrafx, and being surprised by the graphics. I don't think P&L, Inc was CD+G, but their '97 release "Don't Be Afraid" was a mixed mode data/audio CD that had the contents of the band's FTP site on it, comprised of pictures and text files from their mailing list and newsgroups. Fun fact, Kurt Harland composed and recorded the music for the 1995 Sega Genesis game, X-Men 2: Clone Wars.

[@TheMelodicGuitar]

Awesome video. The Green Day Dookie hidden track is the most memorable for me. I think what made it notable was the major tone shift from the album. It felt like an inside joke they were sharing, rather than just hiding an extra song that didn’t make the cut for some reason.

[@304Dolo]

6:35 wow they flagged the pre gaps? U can’t even listen to them on DSP’s that’s dumb

[@gdkey8025]

when i was a kid there was a boyband in the UK called Five... they had a cd where after the final track, if you skipped 80 tracks of silence, you got a cover of the ''Inspector Gadget'' theme on track #99 hahahaha

[@JosephBlack]

5Ive* (that was a trend back then) "Everybody get up singing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5ive will mae you go down now! I am brainwashed by MTV

[@gdkey8025]

@@JosephBlack pahaha!!

[@GTV-Japan]

Weird Al also parodied Endless Nameless! I once did a whole hour of radio with hidden tracks. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough for a full show.

[@JosephBlack]

@@GTV-Japan that is really interesting! I need to look that one up

[@DoorsInTheLabyrinth]

I own exactly one cd with a second side. Flip it over, and there's a dvd track, but the first side is regular audio cd. I always wanted to do something like that, put a song on the second side and never mention that it's there. let people find it, or not. On records there are a ton of neat tricks. Sometimes they cut two parallel grooves, so you can think you're starting one song, but actually be getting another. And lock-grooves (like what you describe on the inner ring, just loops and repeats over and over) can be a lot of fun, particularly in ambient/experimental music. There's a compilation called RRR-500, which is 500 different lock grooves on a single 12" record. Drop the needle, and let it drone and loop on! Another experimental artist took those loops and remixed them into new compositions, with each track on that record (that was a 3lp set) ending in its own lock groove!

[@knowur10sand18s]

Great channel man! Loving the videos and the Abacab album in the background 😁

[@drewapple6053]

The first and only one I ever discovered completely on my own was the “I was alone” hidden track at the end of Green Day’s dookie. I was probably 9 or 10 at the time. I was so confused. Because of how different the song was from the rest of the record I thought that “I was alone” was somehow a default sample song included with the CD player 😅

[@DancingwithGhosts]

yeah that song sounded like it was recorded in a basement with one shitty microphone hanging from the ceiling

[@langdonalger2005]

@@DancingwithGhosts That's because it was recorded like that. It was recorded at a party. I'm 100% serious.

[@emailchrismoll]

I think one of the reasons that everybody seems to remember this CD having a hidden track is because everybody had this CD

[@poetryofbeing]

There was a Corrosion of Conformity album where the hidden track was in the negative space on track one. The only way to hear it was to "rewind" from track one.

[@KiaraStrings]

I always thought the 1-12 tracks off that Korn album was b/c it was a moment of silence for their fan, Justin, who died not too long ago. I guess I was lucky to own a copy of Nevermind with Endless Nameless. I don't use spotify all that much, hence, the dresser full of albums right beside me. I guess my fav hidden tracks are the ones on k-os's albums. I always knew that there were hidden tracks on albums because my CD player would always show how long the song would be, hence why I would never be surprised.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

so yours does have it on there? that's so trippy because mine stops after "something in the way" I feel ripped off! lol

[@KiaraStrings]

​@@DancingwithGhosts That's because of a error due to a mastering issue. The original copies didn't ACTUALLY have it but it was added on to later album copies.

[@joemills931]

Some of my favorite hidden tracks Dog fashion disco -Grease had to rewind on the first song to hear it. Glassjaw hidden track on everything you wanted to know about silence H2O - live song My love is real and a bunch of other random stuff hidden track on the self titled album.

[@kevin10001]

Being born in 1984 I remember this as well as well as getting an international copy of an album and there were tracks on it that wasn’t made available on the American version of the album cause I like one of the 2 additional songs even though most of the additional tracks were remixes

[@fandarzelig]

Hell yeah. I loved discovering this type of thing. Similarly, once I put a CD into my CD-ROM drives and instead of the music player opening, a video played. I then went through all my CDs seeing if I could find more hidden video content. Maybe I found one?

[@DancingwithGhosts]

oh yes the "enhanced" compact disc.. once again, Limp Bizkit's "Significant Other" was one of those. It had the crappiest of 120p video of someone spray-painting the album cover on a wall which was kinda cool, and maybe some jpegs.. just another marketing gimmick

[@wendyheatherwood]

I used to have a CD player that tried to play the multimedia parts of CDs. Track 1 become Track 2 and the multimedia section as Track 1 either caused the CD player to get stuck and refuse to play or skip, or translate it to random unlistenable noise depending on how it was encoded I guess. Fun times.

[@raeganj6744]

I have one of the second pressing runs of Enema of the State, one of the ones that still has the Red Cross on the hat, and it’s got something like that. It’s got one of their music videos and some other stuff on it

[@ShawnTewes]

The one that comes to mind is on the Beastie Boys album Hello Nasty where there's a hidden track in the pre gap between tracks 2 "The Move" and 3 "Remote Control" which is basically a 50 second loop of the song "El Rey Y Yo" by Los Angeles Negros. Another hidden track is an acapella at the end of Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

yessss i forgot about that, i feel like hello nasty had quite a few pre-gap pieces, they were all brilliant, such a good album

[@leviathan_is_me]

The last hidden track I experienced was Jamiroquais "Automaton" album, which had a "Japanese only" hidden track "Nice and Spicy" which is a great track.

[@LeeGion_981]

Super Furry Animals had a -1 track on one of their albums ‘guerrilla’, where you had to hold down the rewind button from track 1 until you got to the start of track -1

[@ffdm_]

nice own hidden track featured. I like your style

[@DancingwithGhosts]

haha you're the first one to point that out

[@ffdm_]

@@DancingwithGhosts ikr ;) but then again, I do own a couple hundred CDs and a few dozen vinyls myself and was already looking forward to this video. plus this was the first time I ever heard about the "locked groove" (edit: bands recording samples within that groove tbe), so that's appreciated

[@splitterrrr]

S.C.I.E.N.C.E by Incubus scared the shit out of me as a kid. The last song ends with the bad arguing in the studio and then after a few minutes of silence there's about 10 minutes of weird sampled beats and warped vocals and what sounds like some childrens toy like a speak n spell being fucked around with? Really tripped me out not expecting it the first time around

[@laurisaarinen1126]

That is one of the best hidden tracks ever! 10 minutes of total madness 😂

[@moseshamlett3887]

There was an hour long secret track on Hank 3's "Straight to Hell" album that was one of the most bizare things I've ever heard.

[@MadRockDrummer18]

I think the weirdest hidden track I heard was “Michael & Geri” at the end of Korns debut album right after Daddy. This was an awesome video, dude!

[@laurisaarinen1126]

One of the more special hidden tracks is on 311's Transistor album where it's actually before the first track and i mean as track 0. You have to rewind the album into the "negative space" before track 1 starts and you get a cool instrumental intro. Sadly i never had a cd player that could rewind to the negative... There is also the common silence after the last track followed by some kind of eerie space noise. One of my favorite albums ever made.

[@GooberScotsman]

The Strong Bad Sings album had a secret song within an existing track. It's Homestar poorly playing the piano while singing. I remember listening to the album and forgot to stop after the last song. I looked at the timecode on my CD player as it was registering a longer track length than stated on the case. It was a cool little experience when that happened. I also remembered that the song Moving Very Slowly did a fake fade out to make you think the song was over only for it to fade back in and finish.

[@xenos_n.]

Because It's Midnight was the best song on that album.

[@5334235]

I remember the surprisement/excitement in finding out about the secret track 13 on the Pet shop boys albym Very from 1993. The CD had been played through and I left it playing until it would automaticly stop. Instead, after some 2 or so minutes of silence, this secret track started to play. Also the orange opaque CD tray of the case hide some images underneath.

[@Michael-ue3dm]

One of my favorites was Course of Empire's 1994 "Initiation" album. This had two. One was a track embedded six minutes before the first track and the only way to access it was to scroll backwards from the beginning of track one. The other was several minutes of what seemed like distortion and static, but if you switched it from stereo to mono, you'd hear an actual song. Both I thought were the weakest songs on the album, but the way they were hidden was brilliant for its time.

[@mtwice4586]

What an awesome video. Definitely a trip down memory lane (born in 82). I think another aspect of listening to physical media was that the songs were arranged in a certain order to maximize the listening experience. You were supposed to listen to tracks 1-12 (at least for the first few listens).

[@DancingwithGhosts]

yep.. whenever i organized my band's tracklisting for our CD it was definitely on purpose

[@justingalasso1850]

You could also hold in the rewind button on tracks you knew had them and access them that way also amazon music has them, but it's added on the end of the song like it's a part of it.

[@gdkey8025]

I also remember on Ps1 games tracks 2 onwards would work on a cd player and play the game's sountrack

[@BenjaminNixon]

I remember the only way you could get an official copy of Nine Inch Nails' Quake soundtrack was to just buy the game and play the CD.

[@gdkey8025]

@@BenjaminNixon same for certain tracks on the wipeout sountracks... good times

[@laurisaarinen1126]

Really? I never knew, how freakin cool is that!

[@PollyBonanzas]

There were also hidden tracks before the album. You’d have to rewind before track 1 it hear it. The only one I know of is “Lullaby” by Fall Out Boy off their album Folie à Deux.

[@matthewniederberger9367]

Blink 182 live album Mark Tom and Travis show. Theres a whole bunch of hidden tracks after the last listed track. Its all the banter they would do between songs at shows. Its pretty great.

[@lightbright4996]

The Dead Weather 2011 LP Sea Of Coward has 30 seconds songs hidden underneath the label. I thought that was pretty cool. One of them was the beginning of later released ''Mile Markers'' and the other one was babytalk of some kind.

[@HalfAnimation]

one of my favorite hidden tracks is hidden in the sand by tally hall, only because it is their most streamed song on spotify and it’s just a hidden track. that’s what tiktok will do to songs

[@maybefaith23]

I've always found it to be a shame I didn't grow up in the age of the hidden track. My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade features the hidden track Blood after the album's outro Famous Last Words. I listened to the album for the first time on Spotify and was at first confused why the final song was labelled as hidden despite it literally being right in front of my eyes and even more confused when the song started as to why the first minute and a half of it was complete silence (for some reason they didn't get rid of that on streaming despite the fact that it isn't gonna trick anyone anymore). I had a similar experience with Radiohead's Kid A as I thought the song Untitled was supposed to be the album's closer, when it was originally a hidden track that was no longer hidden thanks to the way Spotify shows their track lists. I always thought it was great as a closer due to it being a short ambient track that allowed you to reflect on the album you just finished, when really it was a hidden track, and in reality, the song Motion Picture Soundtrack was the album's true outro.

[@joshtoten]

Adding onto MCR lore, the CD version of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge has an exclusive transition between Ghost Of You and Jetset Life that isn't on the streaming version. Which is a shame but thank fuck for CD rips.

[@Henskelion]

I remember even in the late 00's there will some bands that did this. Sabaton had a funny one that crossed over into the age of internet piracy where, after 20-30 seconds of dead silence, a robot voice said "illegal download detected - initiating self destruct" or something like that. There was also one from a thrash band called Warbringer that had this really cool instrumental track after about a minute of silence at the end of their first album.

[@shaunthompson4307]

Great video! I was born in 1981 and I totally agree with what you said here! I usually would wait to see if a band or artist would release 2 singles I like from a c.d. before I’d purchase it and enjoyed getting home with it and hoped that the lyrics would be on the inside of the booklet so I could learn all the correct lyrics and get a better idea and feel for what they’re trying to say in the songs or maybe the whole c.d. would be like a continuous story? I also liked the hidden tracks-and as you said they were a way of being a part of something that you could bring up with your peers after sitting through the whole c.d. and be a critic and prove you’re not a poser fan-they were nice surprises I was a member of both Columbia House and B.M.G. Music Clubs so I have quite a big c.d. collection. I also would purchase c.d. singles and imported c.d. singles because they sometimes would have rare tracks or b-sides that couldn’t be found anywhere else at the time-pre Internet of course. Here’s a few other hidden tracks from artists I’m sure already know of these though-Korn on their self titled debut-it’s a verbally abusive husband yelling at his wife named Terri about parts for a Dodge Dart-depending on how dark your sense of humor is, you may get a couple chuckles out of it? Korn from their second studio release c.d. Life Is Peachy-they cover WAR’s Low Rider with Jonathan Davis performing with the bagpipes and WAR’s lead singer doing the vocals for the song. Stone Temple Pilots from their second studio release-self titled(unofficially Purple)after track 11, Kitchenware and Candybars-Lounge Singer Richard Cheese performs-12 Gracious Melodies;include that number, it’ll keep you company😅! Cracker from the c.d. Kerosene Hat-which had what I’m pretty sure is Cracker’s biggest hit “Low” on the c.d. they have a hidden track titled Euro Trash Girl that was a mediocre hit for them. Nirvana In Utero only on c.d.s released in Germany after track 12 “All Apologies” the track “Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip” is on Germany In Utero releases, I’m sure you can find that track online somewhere? It’s mainly Kurt sarcastically rambling on about stuff and laughing and screaming and a bunch of guitar noise. Sorry to type a mini Bible to you😅, just wanted to let you know I enjoyed the two videos I’ve watched of yours so far, this one and the shopping for c.d.s in 2024 one as well, take care!

[@louiesbatcave5581]

My favourite hidden track is on the Tool Opiate vinyl. Depending on where you drop the needle on the first track of the B-side you will hear one of two songs. Both songs are in the one track.

[@AlexandriaBrah]

William Control's hidden tracks off the first two LPs immediately come to mind for me. they're some of the last big modern examples i can think of, as they came out at the tail end of the mainstream relevance of CDs as a format. the most recent one i remember hearing is the final track off of Arkaik's Lucid Dawn and it was also excellent. i'm rather shocked that The Offspring's hidden track on Smash wasn't mentioned here! it's incredibly iconic to me. hidden tracks were truly a magical thing, a unique fixture of the technology of the time from a bygone era. i miss the sense of discovery before everything was spoon fed to us.

[@Runicen]

My main abiding memory of hidden CD tracks was getting annoyed at all the bands who thought they were being clever by putting 99 tracks on the CD with random shit thrown around like NIN on Broken. The idea is cool, but it felt like anything other than the "Endless, Nameless" approach of putting a track after a silent gap rather than out on its own was trying way too hard. Now, for Easter eggs I still think were cool - things like Radiohead hiding an extra liner booklet under the "Kid A" disc tray... That was pretty boss.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

wait... what? i'm about to grab my Kid A CD right now i had no idea that was a thing!

[@DancingwithGhosts]

lies......

[@Daisy-pz7lx]

@@DancingwithGhostsit's only on original copies of the album, if the disc tray is black it's an original (although the booklet might've been taken out).

[@Daisy-pz7lx]

To be fair with broken the 99 tracks thing was to separate them from the main e.p as they were intended to be on a mini cd.

[@Runicen]

@@DancingwithGhosts I'm glad @Daisy-pz7lx chimed in, because you had me worried I'd fever dreamed it...

[@MikeSparksMusic]

My favorite was probably “Hangnail” from James Taylor’s 1997 Hourglass album… Another oddball was the hidden track on Blind’s Melon’s Soup where you had to rewind track one to get to the hidden pregap song.

[@nicklaserbeam]

My first hidden track was Playdough! Off of Fury of the Aquabats. My little kid mind felt like I found a secret song just for me!

[@BenjaminNixon]

I had Monster Magnet's Dopes to Infinity, and it it had a short secret video clip when you put in in a CD ROM drive of Dave making feedback with the microphone saying "Life is never better". The album packaging made no mention of this, and I can't even remember how I discovered it.

[@matthewniederberger9367]

Also with that Blink album...if the nurse has a red cross on her hat you have the early print ofnthe CD which is way more rare. They were forced to re-release the album without the red cross.

[@GLOCKTOR642]

Rammsteins reise reise album has a hidden track of you skip back one track after putting in the cd. It was clip of audio from the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123.

[@vhsqueen]

I was a kid when i first heard All By Myself off of Dookie, I wouldn't say its a favorite by any means but it was one that left an impression on me because i got the cd and put it on to go to sleep, made it maybe halfway through the album before i fell asleep and I woke up in a dark and silent room, radio was on but nothing playing, as a kid it was an ominous loopy feeling and then the hidden track starts playing "I was all by myself..." so im just laying there like "what the fuck is going on, is this real" lmao.

[@k2a2l2]

CDs are very underrated i personally love collecting them. the art book and disc art makes them very special and lets u connect to the album more

[@Daisy-pz7lx]

Some that I feel don't get talked about enough On the fragile by nine inch nails there's a 10 second sample of the cut song 10 miles high in the pre gap before please Halloween 4 by Billy Cobb is an example of a modern album doing a hidden track with the 5th song featuring a few minutes of silence before a brief reprise of the horns from a previous track play. The devil and god are raging inside me by brand new has a minute long pre gap of overlapping phone messages that fans suspect are related to the many family members that died while working on the album. Mechanical animals by Marilyn Manson has a hidden 15th track that can only be played by putting the cd into your computer which opens a file that plays the song on a loop while you get to look at 2 paintings. The lyrics to the song are hidden in the booklet but you have to put them under the blue jewel case to see. Salival by tool features a hidden track called Maynards dick that has no right to be as catchy as it is. Pearl jam does a lot of hidden tracks with their most famous one being master/slave from ten, but most people don't know that the Japanese pressing of the album lists master/slave and instead has a mysterious bonus track simply listed as ? On the back, when played it's reveled to be a cover of I've got a feeling by the beatles The sap e.p by Alice in Chains features a hidden 5th track called love song which is hilarious and sounds like a parody of the haunted Mansion ride.

[@ThisIsEduardoBueno]

I remember some hidden songs starting after a few minutes of silence, like in Silverchair's Diorama album

[@ericmyers1438]

one of my favorites, both the song and where it was hidden Was Sister Machine Gun, in 1995 they did a cover of the Doors Strange Days hidden before track one.. you had to rewind to -4:20 to play it

[@ashtraydekay6624]

Another great video! the first time i ever heard a bonus track, was on my cassette of "dookie" and i thought i had a faulty tape. i also forgot all about the "pre-gap"

[@frog_king8383]

"All by myself"

[@DancingwithGhosts]

thank ya! i owned dookie but i guess i never let it roll on to the end for me to hear that song.. i wasn't missing anything

[@frog_king8383]

@@DancingwithGhosts It sounded like a sesame Street song

[@dancarrington7100]

I remember there being a gap track on Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause album between F-ck Off and Where U At Rock. There was also one on Dream Theater's Octavarium album. As for hidden bonus tracks, I liked the cover of Marie's the Name (His Latest Flame) on Scorpions Face the Heat. On Dave Matthews Band's first album Under the Table and Dreaming, it skips to track 34 for the song #34. Simple Plan's first album had the hidden tracks Grow Up and My Christmas List. The Green Day and Korn albums I already knew about.

[@powerslave0606]

Ghost Reveries by Opeth contains a pregap that completely misses the point on streaming and even most vinyl reissues. Between tracks 4 and 5 (Attonement and Harlequin Forest), there's a little instrumental titled Reverie, but its title is still attached to the track it's supposed to introduce (HF) when actually was moved to the end of track 4 and closing side A on vinyl.

[@powerslave0606]

Muse's Hullabaloo also contains a sample of a Tom Waits song at the beginning of CD2.

[@brandonm8385]

One of my favorites is the hidden track on Messiah’s Twenty First Century Jesus that comes in two minutes after the last track. The NIN Broken tracks were originally on a separate mini disc packaged with the CD. The hidden track Love Song on Alice In Chains SAP is interesting lol.

[@raycerx87]

Hello fellow Millennial! I'll admit I have bought some stinkers and looking for those little pictures behind the tray and the hidden tracks were always interesting. Also, quicktime videos and enhanced cds! Follow The Leader, what an album.

[@DancingwithGhosts]

haha yes.. it was always f'ing Quicktime! why?! That was an Apple format.. buying a crappy CD was such a shitty feeling haha

[@raycerx87]

@@DancingwithGhosts not gonna lie, I had to download it lol

[@Hoplopfheil]

Halfway House from CKY Volume 1

[@cannabisflame]

AFI had This Time Imperfect 6 minutes after "but home is nowhere" on Sing the Sorrow, and Battled is on the track of Morningstar on The Art of Drowning. Of course you cant forget 21:13 which came after The Light in the Glass on Coheed & Cambria's IKSoSE: 3.

[@jacemclain4062]

Oh also, there's CDs that contain audio hidden in the pregap before track 1, requiring the listener to hold down the rewind button in order to access it. A lot of modern CD players today aren't capable of reading them.

[@ucitymetalhead]

A recent example of a hidden track is on the album here's to the devil by the bridge city sinners. It has one track that had no listing or info and wasn't even the same band, and had i not asked the singer about it i never would have know what it was.

[@thegrayshaws]

Sgt Pepper had that noise on the inner groove too

[@Vader141]

thegrayshaws...do you know what that sound is at the end of Sgt Peppers in the inner grove.

[@thegrayshaws]

@@Vader141 it a tone at the same high pitch as a dog whistle that's just at the edge of human hearing and some random studio chatter is what it says on wikipedia

[@Vader141]

@thegrayshaws that's because you are hearing it backwards at a high speed. Plus I don't think they can say what it is on the site for all to see. You need to find a vinyl pressing of it. Not sure if it's on the stereo copy but it is on my mono pressing. There's a reason it's called the inner grove. A needle will track in but when spun backwards it won't track out. Not knowing how old you are for me to type in full, it says..... We're gonna "F" like Super Man.

[@felipimacedo]

I remember hearing about albums that had secrets on the first track pregap, so to hear it you had to play it from the beginning and then hold the skip backwards button to actually rewind past the 00:00 mark...

[@whoami7721]

One pre-gap track i found by myself was on the progressive metal band Fair to Midland's 2007 album "Tales From the Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times is True". If you rewound the CD, there was a cool vocal intro to "Dance of the Manatee". Oddly, the CD player in my car didn't allow the pregap to play, but an older player I used at home did.

[@robhoyme5014]

What’s up Josh love the channel man hey what are your thoughts on the Smashing Pumpkins new guitarist? Their going on tour with Greenday soon, two bands that really don’t sound like each other imo

[@DancingwithGhosts]

i haven't heard her play yet.. i don't see those two bands getting along at all

[@EddieFrenchComedian]

China Drum had a great secret track on Goosefair. Their version of Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. There's also the much less pleasant 'Sick Party' secret track on 1977 by Ash.