Damn MP3s. I Miss Hidden Tracks.
Back when the CD ruled, it was sometimes possible to discover something wonderful: an unlisted track hidden somewhere on the disc.
It could be something as simple as the final song on the CD that didn’t appear in the liner notes. It could be lurking in the silence many minutes after you thought the disc was over (think Nirvana’s “Endless, Nameless” on Nevermind.) Or, in very rare case, a track was hidden before track one, in essence becoming “track 0” on the CD. (The soundtrack to the first X-Files movie.)
There are still hidden tracks to be found, but like album artwork, they’re well on their way to being killed off by MP3s and digital albums. And since we need a villain to blame, I choose Steve Jobs for introducing the iPod.
I’m not alone in my nostalgia, either. Check out this list of ten famous audio Easter eggs. And for more hidden songs in your CD collection, have a look at this list.
One of my faves is Jann Arden's "To Sir With Love" on "Happy?" unfortunately it doesn't live on Youtube anywhere. I checked.
Long before iPods existed there were CD players with LCDs on them. As soon as I put a disc in I knew exactly how many tracks and how long the duration of them was. Hidden tracks weren't so hidden when the "last" song was 45 minutes long, or when a CD had 100 tracks of 5 second silence. It's obvious the blame is digital, but MP3 and iPods came long after this analog casualty.
I absolutely hate the hidden track… unless it was an unlisted separate track. I've spent hours painstakingly separating hidden tracks in my iTunes library, importing songs directly from CD into a sound editor to manually separate then encode them as separate files. Much prefer the iTunes bonus tracks.