Six demos and rejects the makers nearly binned, then kept forever.
There is a version of every famous song that almost did not survive the room it was made in. A warm-up nobody was concentrating on. A homemade demo meant to be replaced later. A track the band had given up on. A throwaway that, by some small accident of attention, never got thrown away.
These six are those takes. A song run once to loosen up, half-listened-to, that the studio applauded and nobody bettered. A vocal cut in an attic over a breakup and quietly kept instead of re-recorded. A hit whose drums and lead are the first-session demo, never redone. A signature record everyone but one person had abandoned, rescued after hours. An anthem nearly left off the album entirely. A career-defining vocal that is the casual scratch take, sung once on a sofa. The polished version you assume you are hearing, in each case, is the rough one.
The lesson keeps repeating: the people making the thing are often the worst judges of which take is the one. Surface any of these and “almost threw it out” stops being a near-miss. It becomes the whole reason the song sounds the way it does.