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Articles > Rare and unreleased Aqua songs (Part II: Lene)

Rare and unreleased Aqua songs (Part II: Lene) (23/01/2008)

Aquarama continues the effort of approaching you to the available information about the rarest recordings of Aqua. In the second part of this article, it's the turn of Lene's songs.

Two directions

This is the first song that Lene ever recorded. It is a beautiful ballad, written by Tom Hansen. It appears in a rare danish release of 1992: Something Special: Melodier av Tom Hansen, a CD impossible to find nowadays featuring songs by several danish singers, with Tom Hansen playing the piano.

Only part of the song Two Directions has leaked on-line. Check the lyrics here.

Almaz

This is the song that Lene was singing in 1994 when René Dif discovered her and proposed her to join the band he had just formed with Søren and Claus. No recording exists of this rendition of the famous Randy Crawford's song. You may find a mp3, but you will notice that the voice is definitely not Lene's.

Update: A video recording of Lene performing Almaz has finally surfaced at YouTube.

Come on down

This is not a song properly recorded in a studio, but a joke that Lene did for a friend's birthday. There exists a mp3 with a rough recording of the song. Don't expect too much from this one.

Play With Me

In 2002 and 2003, Lene recorded her first solo album Play With Me, which hit the shelves in Europe and selected countries on 21/09/2003. The lead single It's Your Duty (released on 07/09/2003) included a new song, Queen For A Day, with a hip-hop feel. It only appears in the 3 tracks CD version of the single.

The japanese edition of the album included two bonus tracks: Paper bag and Doin' it to you. These songs deserved much better than only being bonus tracks, as they are two awesome tracks, with a lot of potential. They are better than some songs in the standard edition of Lene's album, actually. UK-based music site Popjustice often uses "Paperbag" as the example of a perfect pop song and uses it as a comparison range.

But more songs were rejected from the album. What many people doesn't know is that Lene's album was originally titled Surprise and it had a different tracklist. During the summer of 2003, an official cover of the album with the title Surprise appeared at the some Lene's sites of that time, along with a provisional tracklist. Unfortunately, none of these Lene's sites still exist, so we can't check their news archive. But I'm positive which ones were the first & last songs, and I think that the Scream song wasn't included. It was something like:

  • Pole Position
  • Virgin Superstar
  • Pretty Young Thing
  • It's Your Duty
  • Play With Me
  • Bad Coffee Day
  • Here We Go
  • Bite You
  • Pants Up
  • Up In Smoke
  • We Wanna Party
  • Doin' It To You
  • Paper Bag
  • Surprise
  • As Good As It Gets

Then, in August 2003, the title, cover and tracklist changed into the album as we know it now. But originally, Surprise included 15 tracks. The first song was called Pole Position and there was another unreleased song titled As good as it gets. Unfortunately, after all these years only the lyrics for Pole position have leaked online. Reports say that the song has the same writing & producing credits as It's your duty and that they were similar in sound. On the other hand, two different clips of As good as it gets have made it into the internet, as well as its lyrics. It is a moving ballad, nothing extraordinary but would have added variety into Lene's album.

Lene Remixes

Some Lene remixes are very hard to find. The It's Your Duty (Bimbo Jones Dub), for example, can only be found in a scarce 12". Aquarama managed to rip it into an exclusive mp3, although the sound quality is not the best one.

But the rarest Lene remixes are the ones that Polydor commisioned for Here We Go in mid 2003, probably with the intention of releasing this song as a single. Two of this remixes (the Shangai Surprise Remix and the Kurtis Mantronik Remix) surfaced on the internet thanks to an internal CD copy. The third remix, Manhattan Clique Remix remains unreleased.

Fake third single

In 2004/2005, some Aqua sites claimed that Lene was at Canada shooting a video for the third single of the album. They said it would be a double a-side of Scream and Up in smoke (a new version featuring Jay-Z), and they even showed their cover artworks. But sadly these were all false news. Lene only released two singles from her album (It's Your Duty and Pretty Young Thing), and she only shooted videos for them.

However, on Youtube you can watch unofficial, fan-made videos of Scream and We Wanna Party.


Written by Lleonard Pler. Copyright 2008.

Previous article: Rare and unreleased Aqua songs (Part I: Aqua)


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