All four of these last-minute songs went on to become huge hits, some of them becoming the bands’ signature songs. However, fans almost missed out on them, because they were almost cut from their respective albums. Here are four songs we couldn’t imagine living without, but that were close to never being released.
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Last-Minute Songs That Almost Didn’t Get Released
“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” — Bachman Turner Overdrive
“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” with it’s famous stutter in the chorus, was a last-minute song on Bachman Turner Overdrive’s 1974 album Not Fragile, but was originally recorded as a joke. The stutter was intended to playfully rib Randy Bachman’s brother, Gary, who actually had a stutter, according to the 1988 Billboard Book of Number One Hits. Bachman’s intention was to record the song one time like that as a joke and send the recording to his brother as a gag. Additionally, the band used the song as a “work track” to warm up while recording.
As it goes, none of the tracks on Not Fragile had hit single potential. Other band members asked about the work track, but Bachman said, as quoted in the Billboard book, “We have this one song, but it’s a joke. I’m laughing at the end. I sang it on the first take. It’s sharp, it’s flat, I’m stuttering to do this thing for my brother.” However, the work track had the magic that the album needed. When Bachman tried to rerecord the song without the stutter, it didn’t work quite as well. As such, the joke version he recorded for his brother made it on the album.
“The Middle” — Jimmy Eat World
“The Middle” is considered by many to be Jimmy Eat World‘s signature song, as overplayed as it is, but it almost didn’t make it on their 2001 album Bleed American. According to vocalist and guitarist Jim Adkins, speaking with Chris DeMakes on his podcast, the band needed more tracks for the album. “The Middle” was apparently a last-minute addition that became their biggest hit.
After Jimmy Eat World was dropped from Capitol Records in 1999, they decided to go in a simpler direction for Bleed American. According to Adkins, speaking with the Dallas Observer, “On our new stuff, rather than challenging ourselves [by] getting real experimental, we kind of went in the other direction, challenging ourselves by getting very simple.”
“Eye in the Sky” — The Alan Parsons Project
Even though “Eye in the Sky” became the title track for The Alan Parsons Project’s hit 1982 album, it had a difficult inception and was added at the last minute. At the time, Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson went in a different direction than usual; they went in the studio to write and record, and decided on the album’s theme later. That led to Eye in the Sky and its title track, which gave them so much trouble that Parsons considered not even including it.
Parsons and Woolfson struggled with the arrangement and composition of “Eye in the Sky,” and Parsons was not impressed. “I think Eric did a really good job on it, but I’ve never been allowed to forget that I was not that impressed with it in the early stages,” Parsons later told Songwriting Magazine. “We couldn’t find a feel that I thought was working. Ultimately, we ended up with this chugging thing that worked well, but at one point I really was ready to throw it out.”
“Song 2” — Blur
Blur’s “Song 2” is one of their most well-known hits, but fans almost missed out on that recognizable “woo hoo!” because this last-minute song was initially written as a joke. According to Graham Coxon, the band wrote “Song 2” to clown their record company, thinking they would hate the song. Or, in Coxon’s words, they wanted to “blow the flipping record labels’ heads off.” However, that backfired, as the label reacted positively to the song and asked about its commercial appeal. It was released on Blur’s 1997 self-titled album, sitting pretty as the number two track.
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