Hidden track

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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.

1 Methods
2 Titles
3 Reasoning
4 Notability
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Methods

On unindexed media such as vinyl records, hidden tracks are generally additional tracks omitted from 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. Other albums, such as You Say Party! We Say Die!'s Hit the Floor! have inside-out grooves at the end of a side, which can be found by placing the needle at the end of the record.

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. "Train in Vain" on The Clash's London Calling is technically a hidden track because it does not appear on the track listing, although it was not intended to be such. 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.
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". An example of this method is the hidden track "Me, White Noise" from Blur's Think Tank album. For another 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.
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 (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 many very short 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.
using many short tracks of silence. Examples include Michael Roe's The Boat Ashore, Cracker's Kerosene Hat, and most copies of Nine Inch Nails' Broken, in which 91 one-second tracks of silence separate the 6 main tracks with the 2 hidden tracks. Also, Bowling For Soup's Drunk Enough to Dance, Track 28.

Often it is unclear whether a piece of music should be considered a hidden track. For example, "Her Majesty," which is preceded by fourteen seconds of silence, was originally unlisted on The Beatles' Abbey Road but is listed on current versions of the album. This is allegedly the first instance of a hidden track. The song snippet at the end of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is considered by some to be a hidden track, by others to be noise not worthy of such a designation, and by others to be part of "A Day in the Life."

[edit] Titles

As these tracks are left off the song list, they often have no formal or no publicly known song titles. When mentioned in music reviews, these tracks are usually referred to as "Untitled Track" or "Hidden Track." However, titles of hidden tracks often become known when they, before or after the fact, are released as the title track or B-side of singles, EPs, or promotional releases. Examples include Cracker's "Eurotrash Girl," released in all aforementioned formats, originally as a B-side of the "Tucson" EP, then as a hidden track on Kerosene Hat, then as a single and promotional single. "Endless, Nameless," the bonus track for Nirvana's Nevermind, was also released as a B-side to "Come as You Are." Similarly, a version of the album may have the title listed, as with the Japanese verion of the self-titled album Blur, in which "Dancehall" is a bonus track. Sometimes the song is a cover version and its title thus already known, such as "Look At Your Game, Girl" on Guns N' Roses' The Spaghetti Incident?. Liner notes or other album packaging — e.g., songwriting credits or promotional stickers — occasionally list titles, as is the case with Alien Ant Farm's song "Orange Appeal" on their 2001 release ANThology. 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.

[edit] Reasoning

Most artists that decide to include a hidden track do so 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 television program The X-Files.
On Danity Kane's 2006 self titled debut album included a hidden track called "Sleep On It", a song that produced major fanfare on the 3rd season of their reality show, Making the Band.
In some rare cases, it is used to put forbidden (by law) songs on live discs. An example is Ramones' Loco Live American version, which has the song "Carbona Not Glue" hidden after "Pet Sematary" on track 17. It was originally recorded on their album Leave Home, but the corporation called Carbona didn't like it, and the song was taken out of the album.
The aforementioned "Train in Vain" was left out of the track listing simply because it was added last-minute to the album; it was initially for a different compilation album.

[edit] Notability

Sometimes hidden tracks have become quite popular and received heavy radio airplay, especially cover versions 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. Cracker's "Eurotrash Girl," an original, is one of their biggest radio hits despite being a hidden track from their Kerosene Hat album. Collective Soul's song "She Said" was the hidden track on their fourth album Dosage, but was later released on their greatest hits collection, 7even Year Itch. Another example of a breakout success involving a hidden track is the song "Skin (Sarabeth)" by Rascal Flatts, which received so much success that the album was reissued with the track listed because so much confusion was caused when it was released as a single.

Ska punk band Catch 22's album Dinosaur Sounds features a hidden track, but during the mixing it was erroneously placed in the middle of the album, instead of after the closing track, Lamont's Lament. This caused confusion for some fans who used an automatic tagging system when ripping the album, as the tagging system would often title the songs in the originally intended track order, as opposed to the actual track order.