They Found Michael Jackson’s Lost Songs. And Then Locked Them Away Again

There are songs Michael Jackson recorded that no one alive has ever heard. They are sitting in a vault right now, and the people who control that vault may never let you hear them. Los Angeles, June 26th, 2009. Michael Jackson had been dead for less than 24 hours. His body had not yet been released by the coroner.

The cause of death had not yet been officially determined. His three children were still at the Carolwood Drive house being cared for by staff waiting for someone to tell them what happened to their father. And Latoya Jackson was already in the house looking for the hard drives. She found two of them. in Michael’s personal studio space.

The room where he had worked late into the night. The room where the yellow legal pads with the handwritten lyrics were stacked. The room where the equipment had been running on the night before. He died because he had been planning even then to keep working. two hard drives, more than 100 unreleased songs, songs that Michael Jackson had recorded and never released for reasons only he knew, reasons that died with him.

Latoya took the hard drives. She said later that she was protecting them, that she was making sure they didn’t fall into the wrong hands, that she was doing what a sister does when her brother is gone. and she is the first one through the door. What she was also doing, and this is the part that the people who manage Michael Jackson’s estate have never quite forgiven, was making sure that some of those songs would belong to the family rather than to the corporation.

The hard drives were eventually returned, most of them, probably all of them. But the question of who controls Michael Jackson’s unreleased music, who decides what you hear, when you hear it, and what stays in the vault forever, is a question that has never been fully answered. And if you want to keep hearing the stories nobody tells, subscribe before we go further.

Because the story of what’s in that vault is one of the most extraordinary untold stories in the history of popular music and Cino, California. 1979, Michael Jackson was 21 years old. He was in the middle of recording Offthe-Wall, the album that would establish him not as a child star who had survived adolescence, but as a genuine adult artist with something specific and extraordinary to say.

Quincy Jones was producing. The sessions were going well, better than well, but Michael kept writing. The sessions for offthe-wall generated by various accounts somewhere between 30 and 40 tracks. The album that was released contained 10. The remaining 20 to 30 songs written and recorded by a 21-year-old at the height of his creative powers in collaboration with Quincy Jones and some of the best session musicians in the world went into a vault.

Some of them have leaked over the years. fragments, demo versions, rough mixes that made their way onto bootleg recordings and fan forums. The fans who have heard them describe them almost universally as extraordinary. You have not heard them officially. You may never hear them officially. This was not unusual for Michael Jackson.

It was in fact the pattern of his entire career. For every album he released, he recorded three to four times as many songs. The sessions for Thriller generated dozens of tracks. Only nine made the final cut. Bad generated more than 60 vocally finished songs. The album contained 11. Dangerous, History, Invincible. Each one represented the tip of an iceberg of recorded material that was deemed, for one reason or another, not quite right for release, not strong enough, not finished, not the right moment, not what he wanted the world to hear right now.

Michael Jackson was a perfectionist in a very specific way. He didn’t just want his music to be good. He wanted it to be exactly right in a way that only he could define that shifted depending on the day and the project and the specific feeling he was chasing. Songs that were technically finished, that were vocally complete, that his collaborators considered extraordinary, could sit in the vault for years because Michael felt something was missing that he couldn’t yet name.

But here’s what nobody told you. Because perfectionism is only half the explanation. The other half is something darker, something that has to do with control and money. And the specific way that Michael Jackson’s relationship with the music industry made him hold his music more and more tightly as the years went on. New York, 1984.

Michael Jackson was 26 years old. He was the most famous person on earth. Thriller had just sold 40 million copies, a number that had never been achieved and has never been surpassed. He was in negotiation with Sony Music about the next phase of his career, about the deal that would define the rest of his professional life.

He was also quietly and systematically beginning to understand something about the music industry that most artists don’t figure out until it’s too late. The songs don’t belong to you. The masters, the original recordings, the physical and digital property of the music itself belong to whoever owns the label.

Michael Jackson’s masters had belonged to Mottown when he was a child. They now belonged to Sony and Sony’s ownership of those masters meant that Sony controlled how the music was used, when it was licensed, who could sample it, how much money it generated, and where that money went. Michael understood this earlier than most. He also understood something else.

If he held on to unreleased music, if he kept it in a vault under his own control, then that music was his. It couldn’t be licensed without his permission. It couldn’t be used in a commercial or a film or a tribute album without him agreeing. It was, in a very real sense, the only music he actually owned. The vault was not just perfectionism.

The vault was power. Every song Michael Jackson kept unreleased was a negotiating chip, a piece of leverage, a statement to Sony and to every other entity that wanted a piece of him. That there was more. That he was not finished. That the world had not yet heard everything. that his value as an artist was not limited to what had already been released.

He held on to that music the way a person holds on to something they know they might need later. Don’t miss this because in 1985, Michael Jackson did something with that understanding of music ownership that changed the entire industry. and it had nothing to do with his own vault, New York. 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the ATV music catalog for 47.5 million.

He acquired the rights to more than 4,000 songs and including the entire Beatles catalog which Paul McCartney had famously told him to buy as an investment and then watched with a mixture of admiration and bitterness as Michael actually did it. The purchase made Michael Jackson one of the most powerful figures in music publishing.

Not as a performer, not as a songwriter, but as an owner. He owned the rights to yesterday. He owned the rights to Let It Be. He owned the rights to songs that had defined the culture of the previous 20 years. Paul McCartney was furious. The two men who had been friends and collaborators, who had recorded The Girl Is Mine and Say Say Say Say Say Say Say together, who had spent time at each other’s homes, who had genuinely liked each other, were never quite as close again.

But Michael understood something that Paul McCartney, despite being one of the most commercially sophisticated musicians of his generation, had not quite grasped in time. In the music business, ownership is everything. Performance is temporary. Ownership is permanent. He applied the same logic to his own unreleased music.

If it stayed in the vault, it was his. Once it was released, it became subject to the machinery of the industry, the label’s marketing decisions, the licensing requests, the commercial uses he might not approve of. In the vault, it was still pure, still exactly what he intended it to be, still his. Here’s what changes everything.

Because the vault became something else after 1993. Something that had nothing to do with perfectionism or business strategy. Something much more personal. Los Angeles 1993 and 1994. The allegations came. And with the allegations came something that Michael Jackson had never experienced before. Not the criticism, not the tabloid coverage, not even the commercial failure that Invincible would later represent.

Something more fundamental. He stopped trusting the world with his music. The songs he had been working on, the material that would eventually become history, were already among the most personal music he had ever written. Scream, Stranger in Moscow, childhood. Songs that contained more of his interior life than anything he had previously put on record.

He finished them. He released them, but he also held back. The Sessions for History generated, like every other Michael Jackson album, far more material than made the final cut. Songs that had been recorded in the same sessions as Scream and Stranger in Moscow. Songs that carried the same emotional weight, the same raw specificity about what it felt like to be him in 1994 went into the vault.

Producers who worked with him during this period have described the experience of watching him make the decision to withhold a song. How he would listen to a finished track and then go quiet. How he would say sometimes that he wasn’t sure the world was ready for it. How he seemed in those moments to be protecting something, not just the music, but himself.

After 1993, the vault was not just business. It was armor. Ask yourself what it means to have written something true. Something that reveals exactly who you are and what you have been through and to decide that the world that is currently trying to destroy you is not the right audience for it.

to hold it back, to protect it, to put it somewhere safe until the moment is right, and then to die before the moment arrives. San Fernando Valley, California. December 2024. A storage unit. It had belonged to Brian Loren, a music producer who had worked with Michael Jackson in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the period between Bad and Dangerous.

Lauren was one of dozens of collaborators who had worked with Michael during that extraordinarily productive period. One of the people who had sat in rooms with him while he chased the specific sound he was hearing in his head. When the storage unit was opened and its contents examined, what was found inside stopped everyone who saw it.

12 complete, fully recorded songs. Songs from the 1989 to 1991 period, the years when Michael Jackson was at the absolute peak of his creative powers. Between the commercial triumph of Bad and the artistic ambition of Dangerous, 12 songs that nobody, including the most dedicated fans, had ever heard in their complete versions.

The estate confirmed that the tapes were real, that they were copies of known sessions, not new recordings, but full versions of songs that had previously existed only as fragments or rumors in the fan community. Some fans had known the titles. None had heard the complete versions. The estate also confirmed that they are unlikely to be officially released.

They join an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 other recordings. the true size of the vault, according to Michael’s closest collaborators, that exists somewhere in some form and that the public may never hear. Bruce Swedian, who recorded and mixed most of Michael’s greatest albums, has said that only a small percentage of Michael’s full catalog has been released.

Bill Bautrell, another longtime collaborator, said the same thing in almost the same words. 1%, perhaps two, perhaps five, if you are being generous. The rest is in the vault. You still haven’t heard the most extraordinary part because the question of what’s in that vault and who decides whether you ever hear it has become one of the most contested questions in the history of music.

And the answer involves a cast of characters that Michael Jackson himself would not have chosen. Los Angeles 2009. The Michael Jackson estate is run by two men, John Brana and John Mlan. They were named as co-executives in Michael’s will, a will that Michael had updated in 2002, 7 years before his death.

They control the vault. They decide what gets released, when, and in what form. They negotiate the deals with Sony. They approve the postumous albums. Michael in 2010, Xcape in 2014, the various anniversary editions and compilations that have appeared in the years since his death. They are by any measure successful custodians of a remarkable legacy.

The estate has generated billions of dollars since 2009. The music has been preserved and promoted with considerable skill. But they are not Michael Jackson. And the decisions they make about what to release and what to keep in the vault are decisions that Michael Jackson himself never made because Michael died before he could make them.

The songs that are sitting in that vault right now, the 60 bad era outtakes, the history era material, the dangerous sessions, the 12 tapes from Brian Loren’s storage unit, the recordings on the hard drives that Latoya found the morning after Michael died were not held back by Michael Jackson because he decided the world shouldn’t hear them.

Some of them were held back because he was still working on them. Some were held back because the timing wasn’t right. Some were held back simply because he ran out of time. And now other people are deciding on his behalf what the world deserves to hear. Tito Jackson said in 2021 that there is still a lot of unheard vocally finished music in the vault.

Tommy Matollah, the former chairman of Sony Music, said the releases could go on for years, even more than Elvis. The music is there. The question is not whether it exists. The question is whether the people who control it will ever let you hear it. There is a recording that Michael Jackson made with Freddy Mercury. Two of them actually.

State of Shock and There Must Be More to Life than This Songs recorded in the early 1980s when both men were at the peaks of their powers. when Queen and Michael Jackson were two of the biggest acts in the world and a collaboration between them seemed like the most natural thing in the world. State of Shock was eventually released in 1984, but with MC Jagger replacing Freddy’s vocals after the collaboration with Michael fell through.

There must be more to life than this remained unreleased for decades. It was finally released in 2014, 30 years after it was recorded 5 years after Michael’s death, more than 20 years after Freddy Mercury died of AIDS in 1991. two extraordinary artists. One song, 30 years in a vault. When it was finally released, the people who heard it said the same thing.

Why did we have to wait so long for this? The answer, as with everything in the vault, is complicated. rights issues, estate decisions, timing, the specific mathematics of the music industry, where the value of unreleased material is partly dependent on its scarcity, and releasing everything at once would dilute the market.

Michael Jackson understood all of this. He had been navigating it his entire career. He just didn’t get to make the final decisions. The vault is full. 1,000 songs by the most conservative estimate. 2,000 by the most generous. Recorded over 35 years in studios from Los Angeles to New York to London to Paris with collaborators ranging from Quincy Jones to Teddy Riley to will.

M to Acon to Freddy Mercury to Barry Gibb. Music from every period of his career. Music from the child who sang on the Ed Sullivan show. Music from the young man who made Thriller. Music from the adult who survived 1993 and made history. music from the exile who lived in Bahrain and Ireland and Las Vegas after the trial.

Music that was being made right up until the end for the concerts that never happened. All of it sitting in a vault. All of it waiting for someone to decide that the world is ready or for the world to finally demand it loudly enough that the decision gets made.

They Found Michael Jackson’s Lost Songs. And Then Locked Them Away Again

There are songs Michael Jackson recorded that no one alive has ever heard. They are sitting in a vault right now, and the people who control that vault may never let you hear them. Los Angeles, June 26th, 2009. Michael Jackson had been dead for less than 24 hours. His body had not yet been released by the coroner.

The cause of death had not yet been officially determined. His three children were still at the Carolwood Drive house being cared for by staff waiting for someone to tell them what happened to their father. And Latoya Jackson was already in the house looking for the hard drives. She found two of them. in Michael’s personal studio space.

The room where he had worked late into the night. The room where the yellow legal pads with the handwritten lyrics were stacked. The room where the equipment had been running on the night before. He died because he had been planning even then to keep working. two hard drives, more than 100 unreleased songs, songs that Michael Jackson had recorded and never released for reasons only he knew, reasons that died with him.

Latoya took the hard drives. She said later that she was protecting them, that she was making sure they didn’t fall into the wrong hands, that she was doing what a sister does when her brother is gone. and she is the first one through the door. What she was also doing, and this is the part that the people who manage Michael Jackson’s estate have never quite forgiven, was making sure that some of those songs would belong to the family rather than to the corporation.

The hard drives were eventually returned, most of them, probably all of them. But the question of who controls Michael Jackson’s unreleased music, who decides what you hear, when you hear it, and what stays in the vault forever, is a question that has never been fully answered. And if you want to keep hearing the stories nobody tells, subscribe before we go further.

Because the story of what’s in that vault is one of the most extraordinary untold stories in the history of popular music and Cino, California. 1979, Michael Jackson was 21 years old. He was in the middle of recording Offthe-Wall, the album that would establish him not as a child star who had survived adolescence, but as a genuine adult artist with something specific and extraordinary to say.

Quincy Jones was producing. The sessions were going well, better than well, but Michael kept writing. The sessions for offthe-wall generated by various accounts somewhere between 30 and 40 tracks. The album that was released contained 10. The remaining 20 to 30 songs written and recorded by a 21-year-old at the height of his creative powers in collaboration with Quincy Jones and some of the best session musicians in the world went into a vault.

Some of them have leaked over the years. fragments, demo versions, rough mixes that made their way onto bootleg recordings and fan forums. The fans who have heard them describe them almost universally as extraordinary. You have not heard them officially. You may never hear them officially. This was not unusual for Michael Jackson.

It was in fact the pattern of his entire career. For every album he released, he recorded three to four times as many songs. The sessions for Thriller generated dozens of tracks. Only nine made the final cut. Bad generated more than 60 vocally finished songs. The album contained 11. Dangerous, History, Invincible. Each one represented the tip of an iceberg of recorded material that was deemed, for one reason or another, not quite right for release, not strong enough, not finished, not the right moment, not what he wanted the world to hear right now.

Michael Jackson was a perfectionist in a very specific way. He didn’t just want his music to be good. He wanted it to be exactly right in a way that only he could define that shifted depending on the day and the project and the specific feeling he was chasing. Songs that were technically finished, that were vocally complete, that his collaborators considered extraordinary, could sit in the vault for years because Michael felt something was missing that he couldn’t yet name.

But here’s what nobody told you. Because perfectionism is only half the explanation. The other half is something darker, something that has to do with control and money. And the specific way that Michael Jackson’s relationship with the music industry made him hold his music more and more tightly as the years went on. New York, 1984.

Michael Jackson was 26 years old. He was the most famous person on earth. Thriller had just sold 40 million copies, a number that had never been achieved and has never been surpassed. He was in negotiation with Sony Music about the next phase of his career, about the deal that would define the rest of his professional life.

He was also quietly and systematically beginning to understand something about the music industry that most artists don’t figure out until it’s too late. The songs don’t belong to you. The masters, the original recordings, the physical and digital property of the music itself belong to whoever owns the label.

Michael Jackson’s masters had belonged to Mottown when he was a child. They now belonged to Sony and Sony’s ownership of those masters meant that Sony controlled how the music was used, when it was licensed, who could sample it, how much money it generated, and where that money went. Michael understood this earlier than most. He also understood something else.

If he held on to unreleased music, if he kept it in a vault under his own control, then that music was his. It couldn’t be licensed without his permission. It couldn’t be used in a commercial or a film or a tribute album without him agreeing. It was, in a very real sense, the only music he actually owned. The vault was not just perfectionism.

The vault was power. Every song Michael Jackson kept unreleased was a negotiating chip, a piece of leverage, a statement to Sony and to every other entity that wanted a piece of him. That there was more. That he was not finished. That the world had not yet heard everything. that his value as an artist was not limited to what had already been released.

He held on to that music the way a person holds on to something they know they might need later. Don’t miss this because in 1985, Michael Jackson did something with that understanding of music ownership that changed the entire industry. and it had nothing to do with his own vault, New York. 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the ATV music catalog for 47.5 million.

He acquired the rights to more than 4,000 songs and including the entire Beatles catalog which Paul McCartney had famously told him to buy as an investment and then watched with a mixture of admiration and bitterness as Michael actually did it. The purchase made Michael Jackson one of the most powerful figures in music publishing.

Not as a performer, not as a songwriter, but as an owner. He owned the rights to yesterday. He owned the rights to Let It Be. He owned the rights to songs that had defined the culture of the previous 20 years. Paul McCartney was furious. The two men who had been friends and collaborators, who had recorded The Girl Is Mine and Say Say Say Say Say Say Say together, who had spent time at each other’s homes, who had genuinely liked each other, were never quite as close again.

But Michael understood something that Paul McCartney, despite being one of the most commercially sophisticated musicians of his generation, had not quite grasped in time. In the music business, ownership is everything. Performance is temporary. Ownership is permanent. He applied the same logic to his own unreleased music.

If it stayed in the vault, it was his. Once it was released, it became subject to the machinery of the industry, the label’s marketing decisions, the licensing requests, the commercial uses he might not approve of. In the vault, it was still pure, still exactly what he intended it to be, still his. Here’s what changes everything.

Because the vault became something else after 1993. Something that had nothing to do with perfectionism or business strategy. Something much more personal. Los Angeles 1993 and 1994. The allegations came. And with the allegations came something that Michael Jackson had never experienced before. Not the criticism, not the tabloid coverage, not even the commercial failure that Invincible would later represent.

Something more fundamental. He stopped trusting the world with his music. The songs he had been working on, the material that would eventually become history, were already among the most personal music he had ever written. Scream, Stranger in Moscow, childhood. Songs that contained more of his interior life than anything he had previously put on record.

He finished them. He released them, but he also held back. The Sessions for History generated, like every other Michael Jackson album, far more material than made the final cut. Songs that had been recorded in the same sessions as Scream and Stranger in Moscow. Songs that carried the same emotional weight, the same raw specificity about what it felt like to be him in 1994 went into the vault.

Producers who worked with him during this period have described the experience of watching him make the decision to withhold a song. How he would listen to a finished track and then go quiet. How he would say sometimes that he wasn’t sure the world was ready for it. How he seemed in those moments to be protecting something, not just the music, but himself.

After 1993, the vault was not just business. It was armor. Ask yourself what it means to have written something true. Something that reveals exactly who you are and what you have been through and to decide that the world that is currently trying to destroy you is not the right audience for it.

to hold it back, to protect it, to put it somewhere safe until the moment is right, and then to die before the moment arrives. San Fernando Valley, California. December 2024. A storage unit. It had belonged to Brian Loren, a music producer who had worked with Michael Jackson in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the period between Bad and Dangerous.

Lauren was one of dozens of collaborators who had worked with Michael during that extraordinarily productive period. One of the people who had sat in rooms with him while he chased the specific sound he was hearing in his head. When the storage unit was opened and its contents examined, what was found inside stopped everyone who saw it.

12 complete, fully recorded songs. Songs from the 1989 to 1991 period, the years when Michael Jackson was at the absolute peak of his creative powers. Between the commercial triumph of Bad and the artistic ambition of Dangerous, 12 songs that nobody, including the most dedicated fans, had ever heard in their complete versions.

The estate confirmed that the tapes were real, that they were copies of known sessions, not new recordings, but full versions of songs that had previously existed only as fragments or rumors in the fan community. Some fans had known the titles. None had heard the complete versions. The estate also confirmed that they are unlikely to be officially released.

They join an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 other recordings. the true size of the vault, according to Michael’s closest collaborators, that exists somewhere in some form and that the public may never hear. Bruce Swedian, who recorded and mixed most of Michael’s greatest albums, has said that only a small percentage of Michael’s full catalog has been released.

Bill Bautrell, another longtime collaborator, said the same thing in almost the same words. 1%, perhaps two, perhaps five, if you are being generous. The rest is in the vault. You still haven’t heard the most extraordinary part because the question of what’s in that vault and who decides whether you ever hear it has become one of the most contested questions in the history of music.

And the answer involves a cast of characters that Michael Jackson himself would not have chosen. Los Angeles 2009. The Michael Jackson estate is run by two men, John Brana and John Mlan. They were named as co-executives in Michael’s will, a will that Michael had updated in 2002, 7 years before his death.

They control the vault. They decide what gets released, when, and in what form. They negotiate the deals with Sony. They approve the postumous albums. Michael in 2010, Xcape in 2014, the various anniversary editions and compilations that have appeared in the years since his death. They are by any measure successful custodians of a remarkable legacy.

The estate has generated billions of dollars since 2009. The music has been preserved and promoted with considerable skill. But they are not Michael Jackson. And the decisions they make about what to release and what to keep in the vault are decisions that Michael Jackson himself never made because Michael died before he could make them.

The songs that are sitting in that vault right now, the 60 bad era outtakes, the history era material, the dangerous sessions, the 12 tapes from Brian Loren’s storage unit, the recordings on the hard drives that Latoya found the morning after Michael died were not held back by Michael Jackson because he decided the world shouldn’t hear them.

Some of them were held back because he was still working on them. Some were held back because the timing wasn’t right. Some were held back simply because he ran out of time. And now other people are deciding on his behalf what the world deserves to hear. Tito Jackson said in 2021 that there is still a lot of unheard vocally finished music in the vault.

Tommy Matollah, the former chairman of Sony Music, said the releases could go on for years, even more than Elvis. The music is there. The question is not whether it exists. The question is whether the people who control it will ever let you hear it. There is a recording that Michael Jackson made with Freddy Mercury. Two of them actually.

State of Shock and There Must Be More to Life than This Songs recorded in the early 1980s when both men were at the peaks of their powers. when Queen and Michael Jackson were two of the biggest acts in the world and a collaboration between them seemed like the most natural thing in the world. State of Shock was eventually released in 1984, but with MC Jagger replacing Freddy’s vocals after the collaboration with Michael fell through.

There must be more to life than this remained unreleased for decades. It was finally released in 2014, 30 years after it was recorded 5 years after Michael’s death, more than 20 years after Freddy Mercury died of AIDS in 1991. two extraordinary artists. One song, 30 years in a vault. When it was finally released, the people who heard it said the same thing.

Why did we have to wait so long for this? The answer, as with everything in the vault, is complicated. rights issues, estate decisions, timing, the specific mathematics of the music industry, where the value of unreleased material is partly dependent on its scarcity, and releasing everything at once would dilute the market.

Michael Jackson understood all of this. He had been navigating it his entire career. He just didn’t get to make the final decisions. The vault is full. 1,000 songs by the most conservative estimate. 2,000 by the most generous. Recorded over 35 years in studios from Los Angeles to New York to London to Paris with collaborators ranging from Quincy Jones to Teddy Riley to will.

M to Acon to Freddy Mercury to Barry Gibb. Music from every period of his career. Music from the child who sang on the Ed Sullivan show. Music from the young man who made Thriller. Music from the adult who survived 1993 and made history. music from the exile who lived in Bahrain and Ireland and Las Vegas after the trial.

Music that was being made right up until the end for the concerts that never happened. All of it sitting in a vault. All of it waiting for someone to decide that the world is ready or for the world to finally demand it loudly enough that the decision gets made.