10 Perfect Rock Songs Cut From Classic Albums

For all of the greatest albums in history, it’s easy to just gloss over all of the tracks as classic by themselves. Even if there are one of two tracks that do feel like filler, their ability to hold together as a singular piece of work is what takes an album from a pretty good record to something that you want to spin again and again. You have to make sacrifices when making these records though, and some of the greatest songs of the band’s career sometimes end up on the cutting room floor.

Even though each of these songs are more than worthy of being featured on an album, they ended up getting cut from the record at the last second, either being recorded way too late or just not vibing with the rest of the record. While it seems ridiculous for some of these to get cut, a lot of them ended up getting cut for the right reasons, looking to add some cohesion to the record and not getting bogged down by yet another song in the track listing.

Every now and again though, some of these songs had the potential of being incredible, only to be relegated to the B-sides of the record or reappearing years later in demo form from the original sessions. Regardless of how they eventually got to us, some of these records would have sounded that much stronger if they added these tracks to the list.

In the early days of Weezer, Rivers Cuomo wasn’t exactly known as the most heartfelt songwriter in the world. Even when he started to open himself up a little bit more on the band’s sophomore effort Pinkerton, there were more than a few Weezer fans that didn’t want to know about some of the personal problems that he was struggling with day after day. The Blue Album may have been a much more carefree album by comparison, but the band wrote one of their best songs about a tragedy that was too close to home.

Around the time that the band were touring in support of their debut, one of their shows was derailed when they found out that the two leaders of their fan club were killed in a car accident before getting to the gig. Looking to pay tribute to them, Mykel and Carli is one of the more straightforward songs that Rivers ever wrote, writing about how kind these people were to them during their early days and how they kept the band believing in themselves even when they thought things were looking grim.

Even though this was far from the oversharing we got later in a song like The Good Life, this was just the start of tremendous B-sides to come from almost every Weezer album, with some of the more maligned albums of their career still having a handful of decent cuts that somehow got left on the cutting room floor. It might not have had the best inspiration, but the raw emotion on this song almost deserves a place next to Say It Ain’t So as one of Weezer’s most heartfelt songs.