Music history is full of near-misses. Sometimes the timing was wrong. Sometimes two massive personalities simply couldn’t coexist in a room long enough to finish anything. And sometimes the universe just intervened in the most tragic ways possible. These are the collabs that fans have quietly grieved ever since. What makes them sting more than your average piece of music trivia is that they were real. Studio sessions were booked. Plane tickets were sent. Songs were actually started. The gap between “almost happened” and “never happened” has never felt so wide.
1. Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson: The Llama in the Room
Three songs were recorded as duets between Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson: “There Must Be More to Life Than This,” “State of Shock,” and “Victory.” Michael Jackson had been a dedicated Queen fan, regularly attending their shows at The Forum in Los Angeles, and it was he who proposed that the two of them collaborate. The sessions took place in 1983 at Jackson’s home studio in Encino, California.
Jackson wasn’t keen on Mercury’s recreational drug use during the sessions, and following an incident where he caught Mercury using cocaine, Mercury returned to London and the tracks remained unfinished. More than three decades after the recording sessions, a joint version of “There Must Be More to Life Than This” was finally released on Queen’s 2014 compilation album Queen Forever, produced by William Orbit. The third song, “Victory,” remains the only Jackson-Mercury collaboration not yet officially released or leaked.
2. Kurt Cobain and Michael Stipe: A Collaboration Meant to Save a Life
R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe was close with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and was even named as the godfather of Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean. Stipe later opened up about a proposed musical collaboration with Cobain, admitting that it was his attempt to build a bridge with his troubled friend. By 1994, Stipe had grown deeply concerned about Cobain’s dangerous drug spiral, and in an attempt to bring Cobain back from the abyss, he planned a collaboration with the doomed grunge singer.
Stipe sent him a plane ticket and a driver, but Cobain tacked the plane ticket to the wall in his bedroom, and the driver sat outside the house for ten hours. Kurt wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t answer the phone. Before the two could collaborate, Cobain took his own life in April of 1994. After Cobain’s death, Stipe channelled his pain and remorse into the lyrics of “Let Me In,” later saying that the entire song was about Kurt.
3. David Bowie and Kraftwerk: Lost in Translation
David Bowie was famously obsessed with Kraftwerk throughout the 1970s, so it was hardly a surprise that he wanted to record with the seminal German band. Bowie apparently tried to recruit former Kraftwerk guitarist Michael Rother to play a part in the Low album sessions in 1976, but Rother sadly never got the message. The timing was extraordinary, given that Low would become one of rock’s most influential records.
The two artists orbited each other creatively for years nonetheless. Bowie’s Berlin trilogy bore a clear debt to Kraftwerk’s electronic minimalism, and the influence was so undeniable that many listeners assumed some formal collaboration existed. It did not. For every dream collab that did happen, such as Bowie with Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney with Stevie Wonder, there were dozens that were touted and then quietly abandoned for one reason or another.
4. Pharrell Williams and Michael Jackson: Eight Songs That Went Elsewhere
Pharrell Williams and Michael Jackson had struck up something of a friendship in the years before the King of Pop’s passing. The story of what followed is one of pop music’s great quirks of fate. Pharrell had written and produced a batch of songs specifically intended for Jackson, but the tracks never reached him in time.
Pharrell later revealed that he had written eight songs for Jackson that never made it to him, and those songs eventually ended up on Justin Timberlake’s record. He added that Jackson later expressed regret at not taking the songs. The thought that some of Timberlake’s most celebrated early material was originally conceived for Jackson is the kind of counterfactual that lingers. A full Pharrell-produced Jackson album might have redefined both careers.
5. Jimmy Page, Chris Squire, and Alan White: The Supergroup That Lost Its Voice
In 1981, former Yes members Alan White and Chris Squire met up with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page in the hopes of creating a supergroup consisting of members from both bands. At the time, Yes had recently disbanded, while Led Zeppelin was indefinitely inactive following the death of drummer John Bonham. The prospect of these two titanic rock forces combining was genuinely staggering.
A group comprising former Yes and Led Zeppelin members almost came to fruition but had to be abandoned due to the absence of a singer, bad timing, and various legal complications. Page, Squire, and White eventually recruited Robert Plant – who declined – and later auditioned other vocalists, but nothing ever crystallized. Rock history took a very different path, and we’re left to imagine what that record might have sounded like.
6. Nirvana and R.E.M.: A Musical Friendship Frozen in Time
The bond between Cobain and Stipe was formed because Cobain was a longtime fan of R.E.M.’s music. Famously, in his list of 50 favorite albums of all time, Cobain included R.E.M.’s 1988 opus Green. In a 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, Cobain praised R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People heavily and told the publication how he wanted to emulate R.E.M. on Nirvana’s fourth album. That fourth album, of course, was never made.
Stipe later reflected on Cobain’s talent, saying that Kurt was a great songwriter who was also in a steady transition. As an artist, he had reached the end of one thing and was ready to explore the next phase. But he didn’t make it. The mutual admiration between these two bands was real and documented, which makes the absence of a proper studio document between them all the more painful to consider.
7. Kanye West and Miley Cyrus: The Remix That Vanished
Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” was allegedly given the Miley Cyrus treatment, though the remix never saw an official release. Recorded with super-producer Mike Will Made It straight after Miley’s VMAs controversy, it was said to sound remarkable – which makes the fact that it was shelved all the more frustrating. The moment in the pop cultural calendar would have been near-perfect for a release like this.
The mid-2010s were a period where both artists were at peak provocation levels. Cyrus was dismantling her Disney image aggressively, and Kanye was in full creative overdrive. The combination of that specific energy, in that specific moment, could only have happened then. It didn’t. The track exists somewhere, presumably, but the public has never heard it officially.
8. Michael Jackson and Madonna: Academy Awards, Then Silence
At the 1991 Academy Awards, a Marilyn Monroe-esque Madonna brought Michael Jackson as her date. Rumors circulated that Madonna had recorded vocals on Jackson’s “Dangerous” album, but their work together never saw the light of day. Both artists were at the very apex of global pop celebrity at that precise moment, and the appetite for a joint project would have been enormous.
The overlap in their artistic worlds was genuine. Both had a taste for spectacle, for pushing visual storytelling in music videos, and for commanding massive live audiences. A proper duet or collaborative project between pop’s two most dominant figures of that era would have been a cultural event of the first order. Instead, both continued separately, and the collaboration remained permanently in the category of rumor.
9. Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher: Britpop’s Most Unlikely Peace Treaty
Damon Albarn once claimed that a collaboration with Noel Gallagher was a distinct possibility at some point in the future, teasing the idea that Britpop’s most famous sparring partners had buried the hatchet and might team up for something once considered unthinkable. Given the legendary mid-1990s chart rivalry between Blur and Oasis, the suggestion alone was enough to generate a wave of excitement.
Gallagher quickly took to Reddit to rubbish the suggestion, calling it a flippant comment. Still, the idea had legs precisely because the two men had genuinely mellowed toward each other after decades of public antagonism. A record that combined Albarn’s experimental instincts with Gallagher’s gift for melody and directness would have been a fascinating collision. The closest thing we ever got was a shared stage at various charity events, which is not quite the same thing.
10. The NWA Reunion Album: Before Eazy-E Was Gone
Prior to the untimely death of Eazy-E, the world’s most dangerous group was planning a reunion album. In one especially moving scene of the Straight Outta Compton film, we learn that the full group had been circling the idea of getting back together – unfortunately, that reunion never happened. The internal fractures of NWA had been well-publicized throughout the early 1990s, making any potential reconciliation feel both unlikely and deeply significant.
Ice Cube and Dr. Dre had separately teased the idea of a joint album called Heltah Skeltah for a few years in the mid-1990s, going so far as to release a single that appeared on the Murder Was the Case soundtrack. But a full NWA reunion, with all the original voices in one room working toward a shared vision, never materialized before Eazy-E’s death from AIDS-related complications in March 1995. The demos and fragments that exist serve as a reminder of how close history came to going differently.
