Vol. 9: After the Silence
As much time as I’ve spent actively listening to music in my lifetime, I’ve probably spent just as many hours subconsciously taking it in.
Since I was a teenager, falling asleep to music has been part of my nightly routine. If I was alone, it would be playing through my ghetto blaster. If I was living with a roommate, or crashing in hostels while backpacking through Australia, I’d throw on headphones. At some point in the middle of the night, after rolling over one too many times, they’d end up tangled in the sheets or ripped off completely.
It wasn’t ambient sounds or background noise. Not the kind of playlists you see now built for sleep.
For me, it was always about lyrics. I’d focus on them until my brain eventually gave in and I drifted off.
Some people might find it strange that an album like Paul’s Boutique could replace melatonin. Or that Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, with all its layered vocals and detail that really only reveals itself in headphones, could quiet my mind.
The genre never mattered. It just had to pull me in long enough to let go.
I remember one night putting on Everything I Long For by Hayden. I was living downtown with a friend in a large, wide-open studio apartment. It was essentially one big room, but his bed was far enough away that I figured I could skip the headphones.
Hayden's voice did what it always did for me. Quiet, reflective, easy to sink into. Somewhere around the middle of the album, I was out.
Then it happened.
We’ve all experienced it at some point, usually under very different circumstances. A fire alarm. A phone call. An unexpected knock at the door. Something that snaps you out of a peaceful sleep and instantly sends your brain into panic mode.
But on this particular night, it was a deep baritone voice giving a detailed tutorial on how to make the perfect clubhouse sandwich.
“Hi, this is Jonny Poledo, Chef at Poledos. What makes Poledos so wonderful is its club sandwich...”
There are no words to describe the sheer terror I felt when those words suddenly came through my speakers, seemingly at full blast despite the volume being low before I drifted off.
Still half asleep and having absolutely no idea what was happening, I suddenly heard my roommate yell from across the apartment:
“McVey what the f*ck!”
So now, not only am I hearing sandwich instructions at 1:30 in the morning and trying to make sense of them, I’m also being yelled at.
I immediately echoed his reaction.
What the actual f*ck is happening right now?
It only took a few seconds to come to my senses, though in the moment it felt much longer.
That was the power of a secret track.
A secret track, sometimes called a hidden track, is exactly what it sounds like: a song, fragment, joke, experiment, or piece of audio tucked somewhere the listener may not expect to find it.
Sometimes it appears after several minutes of silence at the end of the final listed song. Sometimes it hides in a pregap before track one. Sometimes it is simply left off the printed tracklist, waiting for anyone patient enough, lazy enough, or half-asleep enough to stumble into it.
What made them memorable wasn’t just that they were hidden.
It was the timing.
You had to believe the album was over first.
Where It Started
One of the earliest and most famous examples came from The Beatles.
At the end of Abbey Road, after the album’s massive closing medley seems to wrap everything up perfectly, a short unlisted song called Her Majesty suddenly appears.
It almost feels accidental. Like somebody left the tape running.
That loose, slightly awkward quality became part of its charm and helped introduce the idea that an album might still have one more thing to say after the “ending.”
From there, artists started pushing the idea further.
Some hid full songs after several minutes of silence. Others used hidden tracks for jokes, experiments, confessions, or material that didn’t quite fit the rest of the album but still felt important enough to include.
By the 90s and early 2000s, secret tracks had almost become their own tradition.
And depending on the artist, the reasoning behind them could be completely different.
The Ones That Stayed With Me
The Hayden incident definitely wasn’t my first experience with a secret track, but for the memory alone, it easily ranks among my favourites.
Another one that always comes to mind is Monster Magnet’s Tab .
I remember sitting around with five or six friends at my buddy’s dad’s chalet in Blue Mountain, all of us highly inebriated and fully buying into the idea that this 32-minute psychedelic odyssey was going to take us through every human emotion imaginable.
The way my friends described it beforehand, you would’ve thought we were about to experience some underground version of The Wall.
In reality, it was bizarre, repetitive, hypnotic, occasionally ridiculous, and completely unforgettable.
That’s part of what made hidden tracks and obscure bonus material so interesting in that era. The music itself was only part of it. The mythology around it mattered too.
Someone always knew about a track you hadn’t heard yet. Someone always had a story attached to it.
And because you couldn’t instantly look everything up, those stories had room to grow.
Some hidden tracks became legendary because of the songs themselves. Others became legendary because of the hunt.
Tool’s The Gaping Lotus Experience on Opiate was one of those tracks people talked about almost like contraband. You heard about it from somebody else first. A friend. An older brother. Somebody insisting you let the album keep playing.
That was part of the appeal.
Before streaming made every album instantly searchable, secret tracks spread mostly by word of mouth.
Designed To Catch You Off Guard
Some hidden tracks weren’t just hidden for fun. They were carefully placed to interrupt the listener at the exact moment they thought the album had ended.
Nirvana’s Endless, Nameless is probably the most famous example. After several minutes of silence following Something in the Way, the album suddenly explodes back to life in the form of chaotic noise and screaming.
Part of the story surrounding the track is that it was intended almost like a prank, inspired in part by The Beatles and the hidden-track tradition that followed them.
Even the timing mattered. In the CD era, people would often leave albums running on carousel players without paying attention. The silence created a false sense of closure.
Then the music came crashing back in.
Not every hidden track was designed to soothe the listener. Some were designed to wake them up.
To be honest, I don’t fall asleep to music nearly as often as I used to.
Somewhere between having kids, a wife, a dog, and a phone permanently attached to my hand, I became more hesitant to fully block the world out at night.
These days, scrolling has probably replaced a lot of those late-night listening sessions.
But every once in a while, especially on New Music Fridays when I stay up until midnight waiting for a release I care about, I still reach for the headphones.
And every now and then, when the album ends and silence takes over for a few seconds longer than expected, I still half expect to hear somebody explaining how to make a clubhouse sandwich.
DMM Vol. 9 Playlist:
After the Silence — Secret Tracks & Hidden Songs
I’d also genuinely love to hear from readers on this one.
What secret tracks, hidden songs, or strange end-of-album moments have stayed with you over the years?