In a genuinely wild find that would have me feeling like Nicolas Cage (more National Treasure, less Longlegs), a former California Highway Patrol officer named Gregg Musgrove discovered a small trove of unreleased Michael Jackson recordings after going "treasure hunting" in an abandoned storage unit in the San Fernando Valley.
The unit, bought by a friend of Musgrove, once belonged to Bryan Loren, a music producer and singer who worked with Jackson in the late '80s and early '90s.
The unit's bounty included a whole pile of tapes, one of which was home to 12 unreleased Jackson tracks that he'd worked on prior to 1991's Dangerous.
"I've gone to all the fan sites. Some of [the songs] are rumoured to exist, some of them have been leaked a little bit," Musgrove told The Hollywood Reporter. "A couple aren't even out there in the world."
Along with the songs themselves, there is also audio of Jackson (and presumably Loren) discussing the recording and creative process on the tapes.
"I'm listening to this stuff, and I would get goosebumps because nobody's ever heard this stuff before," Musgrove said. "To hear Michael Jackson actually talk and kind of joke back and forth, it was really, really cool."
The unreleased tracks include "Don't Believe It" (referencing the rumours about Jackon's child abuse), "Seven Digits" (referencing the identification number of bodies in morgues), and "Truth on Youth," a duet between Jackson and LL Cool J that finds Jackson rapping.
Apparently, the official masters of all of these songs are already owned by the Jackson estate, so while this is exciting news, the songs aren't truly long-lost rarities. The estate also said they have no interest in securing the tapes from Musgrove, though they also legally forbid him from releasing the songs to the public.
Seems like the rest of us may never hear these lost tracks, but you never know!