made it again

harold bride, a wireless operator who survived, said the band was playing “autumn” as the ship went down. bryars began this piece from such accounts in 1969 and kept it open, remaking it as new facts came to light. this recording is from the 2012 centenary tour.

wilson abandoned smile in 1967, leaving song fragments and ill-catalogued tapes. darian sahanaja sifted through them, the lyricist van dyke parks came back, and in 2004, 37 years after he began it, wilson finished it.

woody guthrie left thousands of lyrics with no music written down. in 1995 his daughter nora asked billy bragg to set them. wilco’s jeff tweedy and jay bennett wrote this tune for guthrie’s words.

in 1959 collins recorded ollie gilbert singing this ballad in arkansas. in 1978 she stopped singing, because she couldn’t. she sings it here, on lodestar, made at home in lewes and released when she was 81.

first played live in 1995, it stayed a live song for more than two decades, released only as a solo guitar take. the band finally recorded it in 2016 and remade it as a piano ballad.

the 2011 tsunami left a school’s grand piano in miyagi soaked in muddy water. sakamoto took it in when it was about to be thrown away, and on this track he plays it untuned. he said nature had tuned it.

mahler died in 1911 with his tenth in sketches. deryck cooke made a performing version from them for a 1960 bbc broadcast. alma mahler banned further performances, then heard the tape and gave “full permission”.

epitaph went wrong at a 1962 town hall concert, and mingus shelved it. in the mid-1980s andrew homzy found the loose pages of its 500-page score and pieced them together by measure number. it was first performed in 1989.

cohen tried to fit this song onto old ideas, popular problems and you want it darker, his son adam said. after his death in 2016, adam finished it around the vocals his father had left him to complete.

joplin published the vocal score himself in 1911, the year the first great omar was finished, and he never saw the opera staged. no orchestral parts survive. rick benjamin spent years scoring it for his 11-piece ragtime orchestra.

lennon taped it at home in the late 1970s. in 1995 the other three tried to finish it and shelved it, because his voice couldn’t be separated from the piano. technology built for get back finally separated it, and paul and ringo finished it with george’s 1995 guitar.

in 1989 she set the words that end ulysses, and joyce’s estate refused them, so she wrote her own and called the song “the sensual world”. for director’s cut she asked again, and this time they said yes.