Hello You!
Last week we climbed the never-ending stairs. This week, we're asking - should we be dipping into the archives of the unreleased works of dead artists?
And, if you notice anything not quite right with this send or the website, we're in the middle of a huge upgrade. Community page improvements (big ones), better website, artist submissions... and the newsletter itself, just to name a few. Forgive us for any disruption, we'll be better than ever very shortly.
On with it.
In July 2025, Blaze Foley put out a new song.
Blaze Foley was a Texas songwriter who was shot and killed in 1989.
We’ll come back to him.
a vault
Prince had a room in the basement at Paisley Park. A real walk-in safe, combination lock and all, reportedly holding thousands of songs nobody had heard. And we believe it, he was always doing something.
But apparently what he wanted done with it depends on which day you asked him.
His former manager, Alan Leeds, said Prince talked about one day burning everything in the vault. In 2012, Prince posted a video promising to release “every good thing in the vault” in 2013. That never happened either.
So he left behind a locked room and two opposite answers. He also left no will... handy. Under Minnesota law, that put his family in charge of the estate.
The music keeps coming. This year, the estate released TIMELESS: ten songs for ten years since he died, some of them never heard outside the vault until now.
Is it good? Some of it, sure. Is it what he wanted? Music journalist Alan Light put it: there’s no way to get inside his head and know.
That’s the problem with every posthumous release. The one person who could settle it is the one person who can’t - and of course, everyone has an opinion (or an interest in royalties and revenue).
CIRCLES
There are occasions where fans seem to feel like something was done right. Mac Miller falls into that category. Mac was just 26 when he died in September 2018. SWIMMING had come out just weeks before, and if you haven't heard it, now is the perfect time to give it a listen.
He wasn’t finished with music. He was well into recording a companion album called CIRCLES. Swimming in circles was the concept. Sad and amazing all at once.
He’d been working with producer Jon Brion. After Mac died, Brion finished the album based on their time and conversations together. CIRCLES came out on January 17, 2020.
His family called it a complicated process with no right answer and said only that it mattered to Malcolm for the world to hear it.
He was still making the record. It was just finished with the person he chose to work with and not him. As difficult as it was for his family, they believe they did what he wanted.
the hidden things
Amy Winehouse died in July 2011. By then, she’d probably finished writing her third album. Her producer Salaam Remi said he’d counted 14 songs.
David Joseph, head of Universal Music UK, destroyed the demos. His explanation was “It was a moral thing.”
He framed it as protecting her. Maybe it was. But look at what actually happened: one executive decided that 14 songs by one of the great voices of her generation would never exist. Amy didn’t make that call. He did. And let's not pretend that burning the work doesn't send fans into a listening and buying frenzy.
Burning the 'vault' is still somebody deciding for the dead. It just feels nicer, almost heroic.
And we haven't even touched on the Michael Jackson estate. A fan sued for fraud, claiming two producers had passed off someone else's voice as his to finish unreleased songs. The songs were removed from streaming services in July 2022, with the estate saying it had nothing to do with authenticity.
Blaze
At the start of this we mentioned Blaze Foley. In July 2025, a new track called “Together” appeared on Blaze Foley’s official, verified Spotify page. It had AI-generated cover art of a man holding a microphone who looked nothing like him (surprise, surprise).
Craig McDonald who runs Lost Art Records, the label that manages Foley’s catalog called it “an AI schlock bot.”
It wasn’t just Blaze. The same credit, “Syntax Error,” showed up on another fake song, HAPPENED TO YOU, on the page of Guy Clark, a Grammy winner who died in 2016. Both came through SoundOn, a distributor owned by TikTok. Spotify pulled them once someone noticed.
But it wasn't until someone spotted it that anyone cared - it got lost in the slew of AI music that gets published.
who should make the call?
Or, should anyone be making the call at all?
Prince: his family decided, because he never wrote anything down (maybe he didn't care? which is odd for a career of that magnitude).
Mac: his producer and family decided, with his work still in progress, but under the guidance of what Mac had wanted.
Amy: a label boss decided, and the songs are gone. No one knows what she wanted.
Michael: a label decided, and we still don’t know whose voice it is.
Blaze: a stranger decided, with software.
The dead never decide, unless they left instructions. The only question is who gets to speak for them when they haven't, and every year that person stands a little further from the artist.
Family. Then producers. Then executives. Now anyone with a distribution account and AI music making software.
If the artist was still working on it when they died, there’s a case. CIRCLES passes if that is the line. If they put it in a vault and walked away, then it was there for a reason.
The music-greedy side of us, the morbid side would want to hear it. The last things they recorded, the secret songs. The circumstances of the death changing the lyrics, and the intent. The more cynical side... why should people continue to profit from their work? Is what they published not enough? And should we be picking at their bones for what they left behind? Not all family are created equal, and while in one case they might want to put the work out there for the right reasons, other times, it is estranged family and suits who will ultimately benefit financially.
A playlist? Always.
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