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In the field of recorded music, a hidden track is a piece of music which has been deliberately placed on a compact disc, audio cassette, vinyl record or other recorded medium in such a way as to avoid detection by the casual listener. In some cases, the piece of music may simply have been left off the track listing, whilst in other cases more elaborate methods are used. In some rare cases a "hidden track" is actually the result of an error that occurred during the mastering stage of the record's production.
Methods
On unindexed media such as vinyl records, hidden tracks are generally additional tracks left off of the liner notes. Alternately, a vinyl record may be double-grooved, with the second groove containing the hidden tracks. One notable example of double-grooving is Tool's Opiate EP.
On indexed media such as compact discs, double-grooving cannot be used but there are additional methods of hiding tracks, such as:
- using an ordinary indexed track omitted from the song listing. There can also be a few short tracks of a few seconds in length in between the last named song and the hidden song; hidden songs of this nature are usually indexed as track 99, the last possible CD index;
- placing the song after another track (usually the last track on the album), following a long period of silence. For example, on Green Day's 1994 album Dookie, the last official track is followed by several minutes of silence, and then followed by a track known as "All By Myself". This is the most common method used of placing a hidden track on a CD and has been used on Tenacious D's Tenacious D, Boy George's U Can Never B2 Straight; Meat Loaf's Couldn't Have Said It Better; Joss Stone's Mind, Body & Soul; Nirvana's Nevermind; Weird Al Yankovic's "Off the Deep End, which parodies Nirvana's hidden track; The Beatles Abbey Road; P!nk's Try This; Beyonce's Dangerously In Love; Placebo's Black Market Music; Coldplay's Parachutes; Oasis's Heathen Chemistry, Travis's The Man Who, Kottonmouth Kings' Royal Highness, The Verve's Urban Hymns, Coldplay's X&Y, Coheed And Cambria's 3, Circa Survive's Juturna, Blue Man Group's the Complex, etc.;
- placing the song in the pregap of the first indexed track, so that the CD must first be cued to the track, and then manually rewound; these are usually referred to as "Track 0". For example, on the 1996 compilation album Songs In The Key Of X: Music From And Inspired By The X-Files, there are two hidden tracks; to hear them you have to rewind the first track nine minutes. Another example is Factory Showroom by They Might Be Giants. The "downside" of this method is that the CD player will not play these tracks without manual intervention and some models (including computers) are unable to read this content.
- placing the song in between two tracks, using negative time. For example, Limp Bizkit's album Significant Other features several skits between tracks, including the band shattering glass before the song "Break Stuff". Computers usually do not list these tracks separately and will append them to the end of the previous track; in this case, to the end of the song "Nookie".
- using part of the data track portion of an Enhanced CD. If it is a compressed form such as MP3 or aacPlus, then more audio content can be potentially stored than if the track was a regular audio track. The downsides of this method are that regular CD players cannot play these tracks, the sound quality is lower because it is compressed in a lossy format (MP3), unless the file itself is a lossless compressed file (WMA Lossless, FLAC) which occupies more space, and the content is often locked to a particular operating system;
- using several tracks with no silence in-between to produce an uninterrupted song. An example is Frenzal Rhomb's 1997 album Not So Tough Now, although the majority (but not all) of the dozens of tracks making up the secret are listed on the liner notes with names which highlight their secret nature. This doesn't seem to help much.
Titles
As these tracks are left off the song list, they do not usually have formal song titles. When mentioned in music reviews, these tracks are usually referred to as "Track 0", "Untitled Track" or "Hidden Track". At other times, the name is inferred by external communication from the artist; for example, the untitled track on Alanis Morissette's 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is referred to as "Your House" when she performs live. The names of hidden tracks are also often revealed when the albums appear on music download services.
This technique was used infamously for the final Deee-Lite studio album Dewdrops in The Garden revealing 3 tracks.
In addition, songwriting credits can reveal the titles of hidden tracks, as was the case with Alien Ant Farm's song "Orange Appeal" on their 2001 release ANThology.
Reasoning
Most artists decide to include a hidden track simply to surprise their fans. Sometimes, the tracks are hidden for specific reasons:
- Many artists have used hidden tracks to include songs which may not fit the artist's generally accepted style or genre; for example, the track "Horse" on Live's Throwing Copper, which is more explicitly country-influenced than their other work.
- The aforementioned Songs In The Key Of X: Music From And Inspired By The X-Files uses the hidden tracks to keep in line with the mysterious, conspiracy theory nature of the TV series The X-Files.
Notability
On some occasions hidden tracks have been cover versions of a famous song by another artist. In most cases, these songs are much poorer quality. On several occasions, these hidden cover versions have become quite popular and received heavy radio airplay, such as Lauryn Hill's hidden cover of "Can't Take My Eyes off of You" from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill or Counting Crows' hidden cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" on Hard Candy. The reverse has also occurred, for example when Grey Eye Glances included a version of the Yes song "Your Move" as a hidden track on their Songs of Leaving album, having played it in their live set for some time.
See also
External links
- Hidden Tracks: Gems or Duds? an editorial from July 5, 2000
- Hidden Songs A user submitted database of hidden song listings.
"Hidden track"