10 Amazing Songs That Never Made It Onto A Studio Album

An album is normally the one medium where you save all of your really good material. If you have something that you think wouldn’t be worth showing to the public, you’d normally throw it onto a B-side or at least try to bury it on a compilation album or something. These might be considered odds and ends from sessions, but every now and again you end up throwing away some of your best work.

Even though these songs were meant to be listened to in the context of the record, they are actually much better than just a throwaway track, either giving a different perspective on the band’s music or refining what their strengths already are. Since they weren’t tied down to any project, this is where the artist is free to take a few more chances, like playing with a different instrument in the mix or playing around with the structure of how a hit song normally goes.

Hell, if you look at some of these songs on their own, some of them could be added to the album and actually improve it a little bit, either giving a final resolution at the end or fitting somewhere in the track listing. These may have been destined for the cutting room floor at one point, but sometimes the tune is just too good to discard it entirely.

No one who goes into the more recent Red Hot Chili Peppers catalog necessarily has a problem with not getting enough material. Ever since John Frusciante was in the band, it's usually a bit of a long sit trying to take in a full project, whether that's because of the songs themselves stretching out into jams or just too many songs in the mix. Even when they did go a little bit excessive though, it's a crime that a song like Soul to Squeeze had to get left on the cutting room floor.

Worked on in the same sessions that gave us tracks like Give It Away and Suck My Kiss, this is the kind of ballad that seems to bridge the gap between some of their ballad heavy material, somewhere between the sadness of I Could Have Lied and the hopeful sound of Under the Bridge. Since this was also around the time that Anthony Kiedis was starting to clean up his act, you can also hear him trying to find his place in the world here, almost adapting to what it's like to be on the other side of his vices.

When it came time to make the cuts for the album though, this song ended up falling on the soundtrack to Coneheads, with the band thinking that it sounded a little too similar to Under the Bridge to keep on the proper album. You can definitely see where they're coming from, but the Peppers were just coming into their own, and this was the first sign of real growth from the funk rock gods to something a little more interesting.