Just curious about other artists who write a lot and who have lots of unreleased songs. I know Neil Young has a fair bit of unreleased songs and he also releases an album a year (almost).
Frank Zappa released an awfully big pile of albums and he has quite a few unreleased tracks.
I don't know if he'll be able to maintain it throughout his career but Ryan Adams seems to be fairly prolific.

But my question is, other than Prince, who is the most prolific writer of the last 50 years (taking into account unreleased recordings) and is there anyone else who comes close to Prince when it comes to outtakes?

Well, some Motown songwriters have thousands of songs in the vaults. Stevie Wonder has quite a few; Smokey Robinson & H-D-H have even more.

VoicesCarry said:

Do you mean an individual songwriter or songwriting team has thousands of songs in the vault or Motown in general?

This is a slightly obvious answer, but Bob Dylan has been consistently releasing original material for over forty years now. He also has a pretty significant archive of unreleased material.

Stephin Merritt has only been actively producing recorded music since 1990, but he releases music under four differing band names and occasionally contributes to soundtracks. In 1999, he released a triple-cd 69-song album, and almost all of the tracks were pretty good.

Billy Childish has released too many albums to count - I'm not really familiar with his stuff, but supposedly it's pretty amateurish.

rialb said:

Some songwriting teams/songwriters have thousands of songs in the vaults. Not kidding there. I know it sounds ridiculous but Motown's Nazi quality control kept most stuff from ever being released. For example, Martha Reeves alone has over 700 unreleased songs (as an artist) - how many of those are simply remakes of other artists' songs can't be said, but it gives you an idea of the volume. People have been clamoring to get this stuff released, and every now and then Motown releases a few tracks here and there. "A Cellarful Of Motown" is their biggest collection of unreleased masters to date.

A lot of it ends up bootlegged on the Northern Soul scene in the UK.
[This message was edited Sat May 29 12:50:14 2004 by VoicesCarry]

VoicesCarry said:

Whoa! That's a lot of songs! I am gussing that most of them are versions of other people's songs, but still that's a lot of songs.

rialb said:

It depends on what you qualify as a "different" song. For example, there are at least 5 bootlegged versions of Barbara McNair's Northern Soul classic "Baby A Go-Go" (which went unreleased for 30 years), all with slightly different instrumentation and COMPLETELY different lyrics. Motown recently officially released one of these versions, "Countin' On You Babe", on The Ultimate Motown Collection. In it, she praises her man and claims she's counting on him not to stray etc etc etc. Which is, of course, a completely different lyrical spin than the most common version, in which she basically tells her cheating man to fuck off. So that blurs the issue a bit. The same thing with Jimmy Ruffin's rarity "He Who Picks A Rose", which uses the instrumental from The Temptations "I've Gotta Find A Way To Get You Back", but has entirely different lyrics. Different song? It's up to you.
[This message was edited Sat May 29 14:25:31 2004 by VoicesCarry]

Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan, The Church, Steve Allen ()

The Church? Are they Australian? Please explain.

2freaky4church1 said:

I love Randy Newman, but he's far from prolific. There was an eleven year gap between Land of Dreams and Bad Love - of course he scored several soundtracks in that timespan, as well as penning a musical...but still, he can only be considered prolific if you think that Leonard Cohen is flooding the market with product.

flipwilson said:

rialb said:

John Lennon,
Paul Mccartney
Smokey Robinson
Sezen Aksu is one of the best international song writers OF ALL TIMES...she is turkish, u probably dont know her but its her who "composed" the music for the "kiss, kiss" song.actually it was in Turkish but they have wrtten new lyrcs for the english version and its kind of fucked up now i mean the song u hear..Sezen is kinda old now but still is amazing.
Michael Jackson
Stevie Wonder
Aysel Gurel
[This message was edited Sun May 30 10:24:22 2004 by LightOfArt]

I heard George Clinton has like 80 albums worth of material since was in his label dispute.

Gonna make up for lost time.

tori amos, ani difranco

TEENA MARIE

R.KELLY

VoicesCarry said:

Thank you for directing my attention to this awesome release!