10 classic songs that took decades to complete
Songwriting tends to be an ever-evolving process for any writer. For all of the people who can try their best to put a tune together in a few minutes, it doesn’t always come out that way, and most tracks normally need a little more time in the oven before they’re ready to be released. Once artists like The Beatles finally got their creations sounding right, they knocked it out of the park.
Then again, it’s not like every artist meticulously sculpts a classic until it reaches its final form. Sometimes, tunes tend to fall through the cracks or get lost in time whenever they’re first presented, so artists usually go back to the drawing board to see what they can either add to the track or try a more muted approach to see what works and what doesn’t. For example, Lou Reed seemed to endlessly release various drafts of his ‘Lisa Says’ melody over the years, tinkering with it until it felt perfected.
When listening back to the early versions of the tunes, they can almost sound like two completely different compositions in some spots. Regardless of how much layering an artist manages to put on the final product, it usually takes them ages to see the genius in it or realise that it was better not to keep the fans waiting and put out something that they can be proud of.
Either way, every song was worth the wait and then some, usually turning into a complete resurgence for the group or a reminder of why they were so beloved. Whether it wasn’t right for the time for it to come out when it was written or needed that little extra polish, every fan is still counting themselves thankful that they finally got to see the light of day.
10 classic songs that took decades to finish
10. ‘When It’s Time’ – Green Day
Any punk band that tries their hand at a ballad usually has their days numbered. The whole point of the genre is to subvert the normal formula, so why would anyone want to hear the kind of easy-listening schlock they would get out of Top 40 radio? Green Day was already becoming a breath of fresh air for the rock scene in 1994, but Billie Joe Armstrong would sit on one of his most emotional tunes until it was time for it to meet the stage.
For the first few years of Green Day’s career, they were still looking for their identity to an extent. Although everyone wanted them to stay the same bratty punks they always were, American Idiot shot everyone’s perception of them out of the water. Suddenly, they could do a lot of different genres, and when it came time to adapt the rock opera into a musical, ‘When It’s Time’ ended up fitting right in.
Written during the age of Dookie, this romantic ditty Armstrong wrote for his wife perfectly tied up the storyline of the musical, playing up the relationship drama that was always hinted at in the album itself but never properly fleshed out. And really, can you blame them for not releasing it? Every hardcore punk was casting them off as sellouts when Dookie, so this track would have made those same naysayers’ heads explode.
9. ‘Turn the Lights Back On’ – Billy Joel
To say that Billy Joel stepped out of the music business would be underselling it a little bit. For as long as he has been taking up a residency at Madison Square Garden, Joel seemed to be deliberately pushing himself away from the studio, usually under the impression that he had had his say after decades in the business. A writer like that doesn’t just stop on a dime, and once he had the right partner, ‘Turn the Lights Back On’ became the first major tune Joel had released in over a decade.
While Joel made various one-off singles for charity causes or personal reasons since his ‘retirement’, getting Freddy Wexler to help him write the lyrics of this half-finished idea was a match made in heaven. Despite being one of the major players in pop music, Wexler wrote the kind of vintage rock tune that fits Joel to a tee, almost serving as a love song to all those years he was out of the spotlight.
In contrast to the young man’s game that Joel was playing back in the day, this is the perfect tune for a sensible older rocker to sing at his age. He may have been gone for far too long, but he’s here right now for the rest of us, and at this point, most of us are more than happy that he bothered to show up.
8. ‘Shadow of Your Love’ – Guns N’ Roses
In all honesty, many number of tracks from Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy could have featured on this list. After starting production in 1994, the album took 14 years before it finally hit store shelves, and even then, fans were less than pleased with the decade-long sense of anticipation Axl Rose was hanging over their heads. Surely, nothing on that album could count as classic given its reputation, but it is a crime ‘Shadow of Your Love’ was never released in its final form on Appetite for Destruction.
Granted, the whole point of the band’s debut was to hit the audience like a smack in the face from track one to the finale, and there’s no disputing that it’s perfect in its own way. However, ‘Shadow of Your Love’ remained a demo for the longest time before getting an official remaster for the anniversary of the album in 2018.
Considering the group was leaning into their punk phase on this track, this could have helped liven up the album a little bit, bringing a bit more influence from New York Dolls and the rougher end of Aerosmith to the mix. It’s impossible to change the course of history, but if they had decided to replace ‘You’re Crazy’ with this, most fans wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
7. ‘True Love Waits’ – Radiohead
Cutting a new track live usually means it’s a work in progress. As long as people are recording it off the floor, there will usually be a few audio tracks that don’t get the spotlight or have to get fixed later in case someone hits a bum note. For Radiohead, an album is an ever-evolving process, and A Moon Shaped Pool brought us one of their most stunning ballads after first hearing it onstage for years.
In the grand scheme of Radiohead lore, ‘True Love Waits’ actually dates all the way back to the days of The Bends, with Thom Yorke usually playing it as a stately ballad, much like the acoustic version of ‘Creep’. But when it got a makeover with a keyboard that sounded like it was being played underwater, it took on a whole new meaning, given the circumstances.
Since Yorke had separated from his partner of many years and ultimately watched her pass away, hearing the poignant lyrics of “Just don’t leave” ring all the more true, almost sounding like the singer is crying in the vocal booth as he’s putting the track together. It might have been just a breakup lament in the beginning, but now that that tragedy had become all too real, it reads now like a final plea from Yorke just to see his lover’s face one more time.
6. ‘Somewhere Under Heaven’ – Tom Petty
The amount of material that Tom Petty had left over from Wildflowers is frankly stunning. The CD version that most fans picked up was already the length of a standard double album, and yet Petty had enough tunes left over to flesh out an entire album for the soundtrack to the film She’s the One. It’s almost not fair to have that many great tunes, but even that wasn’t the end of it once Wildflowers turned 25.
When going through different reworkings of the album, ‘Somewhere Under Heaven’ was one of the many standouts from Wildflowers and All the Rest, having the same kind of freewheeling the original album had. Although the track listing does get a little bloated, this is the kind of Byrds worship that Petty could do in his sleep, especially during the bridge with those arpeggiated guitar lines.
Given the quality of the tune, it’s no surprise that Petty used to say that Wildflowers scared him by how good it was. Most songwriters have those few tracks that they know will never see the light of day, but if this was the bottom of the barrel from those sessions, there had to be something in the water that got Petty into that zone.
5. ‘When Winter Comes’ – Paul McCartney
For someone of Paul McCartney’s stature, it’s sometimes hard to track how many classics are in the backlog. Sure, the new tunes might be a good palette cleanser through a show these days, but it’s hard to get people to pay attention to a song you think is great when they just want to sing along to ‘Hey Jude’ with their family. When no one could go to concerts in 2020, McCartney had a lot of time to listen, and he managed to find one classic scattered amongst the rubble.
Since McCartney III completed the trilogy of Macca-only projects, a lot of the album has a distinctively homemade feel, as if you’re hearing different projects that McCartney worked on during his lockdown sessions. Right as the album bookends with ‘Winter Bird’, ‘When Winter Comes’ comes on with a lot younger-sounding version of McCartney than many of us expected.
That’s because this idea was demoed during the Flaming Pie era of McCartney’s career. As such, there are echoes of classics like ‘Calico Skies’ in his delivery, as he strums away on an acoustic guitar and sings about living on a farm. That kind of imagery was usually reserved for McCartney’s RAM album, but where that was a man slowly finding himself after The Beatles’ breakup, this sounds like the older gentleman having built a home for his family.
4. ‘Hard Advice’ – Stevie Nicks
Friendships are never easy to sustain in the world of music. For every great collaborative tea that has each other’s backs whenever they play, there are just as many willing to stab their partner in the back if it means getting the most out of a deal. Stevie Nicks was never that kind of artist, and when she found a friend in Tom Petty, she made sure to etch that relationship in stone for all time.
When Nicks first struck out on her own, Petty was the one who helped pick her up off her feet, giving her the track ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ and reminding the Fleetwood Mac singer of how great a songwriter she was upon staging a comeback. While Nicks had written ‘Hard Advice’ as an ode to her musical friend, she never released it until 24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault, sharing the space with other unreleased tunes.
Although tracks like ‘The Dealer’ and ‘I Don’t Care’ fit squarely in Nicks’s wheelhouse, the best part of ‘Hard Advice’ is how open it is about their relationship. Whereas most people couldn’t get enough of the drama surrounding Nicks’s relationships with Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood in Fleetwood Mac, this was the kind of musical relationship sculpted in heaven.
3. ‘Friend of a Friend’ – Foo Fighters
For the first few years of Foo Fighters’ life, the topic of Nirvana was understandably a no go zone. Since Dave Grohl never intended for his band to blow up that quickly, every journalist who wanted a juicy story wanted to know which tunes were about Kurt Cobain and what sage wisdom the frontman learned from the Nirvana legend. Grohl needed to take his time when it came to writing about his friend, but when he did find the time, he made sure that everything was right.
But ‘Friend of a Friend’ was never meant to be a eulogy for Cobain. In fact, Grohl started writing the song about his friend while Cobain was still among the living, putting together a version of the tune on an album called Pocketwatch under the pseudonym Late. That kind of acoustic-style production would never fit in with the arena rock sounds of Foo Fighters, or at least that’s what it felt like until In Your Honour.
After blasting the listener’s eardrums on the first disc, the second half of acoustic material gave fans a look at Grohl’s hearttfelt ditty about his old friend who used to play old guitars and held the audience in the palm of his hand. He didn’t even bother changing the lyrics, but there’s still a bittersweet sadness in his voice over a decade since his friend’s passing.
2. ‘How Long’ – Eagles
The Eagles didn’t really need to release any new material after they reformed in the mid-1990s. Considering their golden years featured a run of bulletproof singles and amazing deep cuts, why the hell would anyone want to mess with that kind of hot streak? Most artists would be playing with fire, trying to make the same kind of record all over again, but their breakout single had already been written a long time ago.
When the group first came up with their classics in their early days, they were known to trade tunes back and forth with other songwriters, including JD Souther, who had penned ‘How Long’ all the way back in the 1970s. Out of respect for their friend, the Eagles never released their version, but after enough time had passed, they figured they would take a swing at it, and the world was introduced to 1976 all over again.
Despite being a little rough around the edges, the harmonies still sound immaculate after all these years, with Glenn Frey taking the vocal for the first time in a while and doing different tradeoffs with Henley in the final verse. Out of all the rockstars that never captured the magic again after their first records, the California legends still seemed to have some sunshine left in them.
1. ‘Now and Then’ – The Beatles
In a logical world, The Beatles Anthology would have been the last that many of us would have heard of the Fab Four. The group had done all they could together as a band, and now it was time for them to say farewell to their best friend, John, by finishing some of his unused tapes. But there was still one missing piece of the puzzle, and Paul McCartney had the idea of making up for lost time on ‘Now and Then’.
According to George Harrison, the original demo of the tune sounded like garbage, so it was shelved in the 1990s in favour of working on two great new Beatles tracks. With the help of new technology, hearing the modern McCartney and Lennon singing to each other across generations as samples of other Beatles harmonies play in the background is breathtaking.
While there were always bound to be fans complaining that the final version sounds nothing like what the original demo was, any criticism is almost beside the point. This is just another example of a touching moment between the greatest rock band of all time to let their friends know they still love them after all these years.
