From David Bowie to Pink Floyd: 10 songs that don’t fit on classic albums
For any classic album, it’s usually safe to assume that everything is absolutely perfect from back to front. It’s stood the test of time for a reason, so each track should contribute at least something to the final product, right? Well, most of the time, yes, but sometimes classics by acts like The Beatles and Pink Floyd have some songs that are out of place in their iconic output.
Then again, that doesn’t automatically mean that the song is bad. While some tracks could hold up with the best the artist has ever recorded, they just make for a bit of an odd pairing when stacked up against the rest of the songs around them, almost like reading a chapter of a completely different book when reading a novel.
Granted, iconic albums aren’t safe from a few clunkers, and more than a few songs feel like they were stuck on the album to fill the runtime. They sound like it too, either being a rush job for them to put together or digging deep into their back catalogue and coming up with some of the most milquetoast music of their career.
Regardless of how they ended up on the final album, these songs are enough to give you a sense of whiplash when you hear them for the first time, usually leading to many people either never listening to the song again or cranking it up wondering the artist will be going next. It may not have fit the vibe for what they were doing on any particular record, but some of these tracks may have unintentionally laid the groundwork for the rest of the artist’s career.
10 songs that don’t fit on classic albums:
10. ‘The Disco Strangler’ – Eagles
Usually, any Eagles album has a certain degree of quality control throughout its runtime. Every record might not hit the same way that Hotel California did, but Don Henley was never going to let crap onto the record unless it had a good reason to be there. When they decided to get in touch with their rock roots again, we got ‘The Disco Strangler’, which might be in the running for one of the most half-baked ideas they ever had.
This is insane, considering this is from The Long Run. The California rockers laboured over this for years to make it so it would be an adequate follow-up to Hotel California, and yet you have lyrics that sound like Henley is making them up on the spot half the time. Also, it would help if the verse had at least a little bit of a melody instead of Henley fumbling around in the dark trying to find something to use.
If anything, this should stand as the song that represents how uncomfortable the sessions for this record probably were. They could still put together a decent groove and could make everything sound alright production-wise, but when you get something that’s merely passable rock out of them, you know that something has gone horribly wrong.
9. ‘Single Pigeon’ – Wings
If you go back and do some research, it looked like Paul McCartney would be considered the biggest joke act following The Beatles’ breakup. He already had a pedigree as a world-class songwriter, but the fact that he announced their split and his insistence on making strange music on albums like RAM left a lot of fans confused at best and angry at worst. Wings may have helped pick him back up on Red Rose Speedway, but one deep cut really needed a bit of work.
Since this was supposed to be a double album before McCartney had to pair it down, you would think that the best material would make it on the final record, right? Instead of getting a single like ‘Hi Hi Hi’ on a proper album, ‘Single Pigeon’ was included, and it’s probably one of the biggest “whatever” tracks of McCartney’s career, barely lasting more than a minute before petering out.
Honestly, a song like ‘Loup (1st Indian on the Moon)’ might be less necessary, but you can at least hear what that kind of track is going for in the context of a double album statement. Considering that all we got was the one disc, ‘Single Pigeon’ is practically a demo that somehow got past all quality inspections and onto the final tape.
8. ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ – Oasis
As far as Oasis goes, Definitely Maybe might be their best statement as a rock band. They might tell you that almost any of their records stand as a good slice of rock and roll, but if What’s the Story Morning Glory was Noel Gallagher showcasing his songwriting, this was them in their prime as a punk-adjacent monster. They still had that fire across every second of their debut, with the exception of ‘Digsy’s Dinner’.
Compared to the major sonic juggernauts across the rest of the album, like ‘Supersonic’ and ‘Rock and Roll Star’, this feels like the kind of dancehall number that would have been laughed out of the room even during the 1960s. Noel may have been going for something lighthearted, but by the time it’s over, it’s almost like you need a song like ‘Slide Away’ afterwards to wipe the taste out of your mouth.
‘Married With Children’ always had the benefit of being recorded as a late-period demo, but ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ is the Britpop equivalent of putting a light jazz song on a Rolling Stones album. Noel did always claim that The Beatles were his biggest inspiration, and this is the moment where he reached the levels of “granny shit” that Paul McCartney got up to during his time with the Fab Four.
7. ‘Don’t Try Suicide’ – Queen
Any Queen song usually makes you feel like you can take on the world. Whether Freddie Mercury was singing about love, victory, or some wild fantasy that he made up, no one would question him as long as the band had passion about it whenever they got behind the microphone. In a catalogue that radiates positivity, they finally found a subject they couldn’t tackle on ‘Don’t Try Suicide’.
For a party album like The Game with songs like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, hearing a song that’s supposed to delve into the struggles of those with suicidal thoughts is already a bit of a hard sell. Queen has done serious topics before, but they handle a song about serious emotional struggles the same way a silverback gorilla might handle a calculator.
Tackling it with the same kind of positive energy as their lighthearted tunes, the song lyrics almost sound derogatory, with Mercury singing that nobody likes it when people commit suicide, and no one will really care after it happens. There’s no right way to talk someone down from their lowest moments, but it’s probably not the best move to patronise them as they think about ending it all.
6. ‘Mama Said’ – Metallica
Many Metallica fans are probably prone to catching on fire when they hear the words ‘Load’ and ‘ReLoad’. The thrash titans were ready to take the next step in their career after The Black Album, but there’s a good chance that many hardened metal badasses cried a single tear the day they heard songs like ‘Bleeding Me’ and ‘Hero of the Day’. Both of these records are far from bad albums, but regarding what Metallica is all about, ‘Mama Said’ is a bit of a weird case.
Whereas the last few albums had their fair share of ballads, this country strum-along tune from James Hetfield doesn’t feel like it belongs on a Metallica record at all. Hetfield had tackled his parental issues in songs before, but this is the kind of outlaw country that feels like it would have been better being spat out by someone like Chris Stapleton now than on the same album as ‘King Nothing’.
Since the rest of the group only supports Hetfield half the time, this is a brilliant piece of art that feels like it’s taken from a James Hetfield acoustic album that we never got to hear. If he’s still up for it now, Hetfield’s best impression of Waylon Jennings may be one of the best pivots that he could make at this stage of his career.
5. ‘I Don’t Want To Know’ – Fleetwood Mac
Most of Rumours seems like it couldn’t be replaced even if Fleetwood Mac tried. They might have been in for an uphill battle when they started writing about each other, but that kind of internal drama often keeps the money rolling in half the time. ‘I Don’t Want To Know’ may have been one of the few softer moments on the record, but if you asked almost anyone associated with the group, it doesn’t really belong on the album.
Since the song dated back to Stevie Nicks’s days with Lindsey Buckingham as a duo, they both sing it fairly well, but recording this meant leaving something out. Nicks had already written the track ‘Silver Springs’, and considering it serves as a sequel to ‘Dreams’, it makes a lot more sense for that to be included on the album instead of this nice little bit of folk-flavoured rock and roll.
Granted, the record’s runtime meant that including it would lead to either removing a song or sacrificing the album’s fidelity when it played on vinyl. It may have stung Nicks at the time not to be given one of her prime spots on the album, but if they still got to keep the title of one of the best-produced albums in rock history, it might have been a fair trade.
4. ‘About a Girl’ – Nirvana
Ever since Kurt Cobain’s death, it feels like everything Nirvana ever did could be considered classic. There may have been a song taken from an extended jam, but if it had the sound of Cobain sneezing halfway through, it was worthy of being included on a box set or something. The core studio albums are still untouchable, and while Bleach is definitely the least of the best, ‘About a Girl’ is so ahead of the curve it’s insane.
If you were to take almost any other song from the record, chances are you would have heard a version of Nirvana closer to what Cobain heard in his head. Everything was more rooted in hard rock and metal music, but ‘About a Girl’ was completely different, almost sounding like a late-era Beatles song with the guitar sounding jangly instead of Cobain trying to abuse the instrument half the time.
The lion’s share of the album might be a purer grunge statement, but ‘About A Girl’ feels like Cobain making the case for Nevermind, ultimately taking what he made here and putting it into songs like ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Come As You Are’. Bleach was already a ton of fun, but ‘About A Girl’ was when it started getting serious. If Cobain could write songs like that, Seattle wasn’t ready for what was coming next.
3. ‘Space Oddity’ – David Bowie
It’s impossible for most to pin down David Bowie’s sound on a normal day. If you can categorise what ‘The Starman’ sounded like throughout his career in less than a paragraph, the next round of drinks is on me the next time we run into each other. Bowie is always hard to define, given his body of work, ‘Space Oddity’ pointed to where he was going amid an entire album of decent folk tunes.
Since Bowie had washed his hands of the folk-tinged vaudeville songs he made on his proper debut, this feels like the man who would one day write ‘Life on Mars?’. Taking the basis of the moon landing and translating it to being about someone lost in space, this is the first Bowie song that could justifiably be considered perfect, so why is it sandwiched next to more of the same on the album?
There are a handful of decent cuts on the rest of the album, like ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ and ‘God Knows I’m Good’, but nothing else really reaches the level of the title track, even for a second. Bowie may have been focused on putting his best foot forward on his sophomore release, but it does seem like he gave us our first look at Ziggy Stardust a few albums too early.
2. ‘Run For Your Life’ – The Beatles
The entire reason that classic albums exist now is because of The Beatles. Otherwise, we probably would have just been looking at albums like a bunch of songs that people threw together, usually not having any throughline of theme to connect everything together. The Fab Four saw the medium as an art form, and Rubber Soul was the first time that everything worked as a whole…and also a little fly in the ointment.
Then again, ‘Run For Your Life’ doesn’t really sound all that different from the rest of the album. The Fabs are in fine form playing-wise, and John Lennon’s vocal take is fairly decent. Considering the song is about a domineering man who would rather see his girlfriend dead than leave him, though, it feels like the rest of the album is rendered meaningless half the time.
Half of Rubber Soul was about delving into complicated relationship struggles on songs like ‘Girl’ and ‘In My Life’, but this is the kind of macho bravado that stopped being funny when you stopped listening to a song like ‘You Can’t Do That’. Rubber Soul might be the first of The Beatles’ true classic output, but if you swap this song out with any of the B-sides, we might be looking at a truly perfect album.
1. ‘Seamus’ – Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd always seemed like mad scientists whenever they sat down to make a record. Throughout every facet of their career, they didn’t seem concerned about making songs as they were about opening up the listener’s third eye as they played the same chords over and over again. They spent a lot of time trying to make it work without Syd Barrett, but Meddle was where they crossed the threshold with a friend’s dog in tow.
While everyone just calls Meddle an album of subpar songs leading up to ‘Echoes’, everything from ‘One of These Days’ to ‘San Tropez’ is perfectly enjoyable, almost like the group are saying that they can write catchy tunes when they want to. There might be the same sentiment behind ‘Seamus’, but hearing a dog barking throughout this bluesy jam doesn’t sit well with the rest of the music.
The band always went for that art-rock sentiment whenever they made this kind of song, but this just feels like they are actively interrupting what could potentially be a great track. There are plenty of reasons to love Meddle, but even for someone who’s a dog person, this is a song that non-dog people could point to as to why they never had man’s best friend by their side.
