Producer Bryan Loren Recorded 12 Songs With MJ in 1990 — Then Disappeared, Left $7M in Storage

$7 million in unreleased Michael Jackson music sat forgotten in a Van NY storage unit for 34 years because the man who recorded it disappeared without paying the rent. Notice because when treasure hunter Greg Musgrove finally opened that unit in December 2024, he found something worth more than money. Conversations, laughter, and the answer to a mystery the music industry couldn’t solve.

The discovery happened on a Tuesday in early December 2024. Musgrove, a 56-year-old former California Highway Patrol officer who turned to treasure hunting storage units after retirement, had been contacted by an associate about a unit in the San Fernando Valley. The previous owner had stopped paying rent years ago. The contents had been auctioned off to a buyer who then reached out to Musgrove, knowing his reputation for identifying valuable items in abandoned spaces.

When Musgrove first saw the unit, nothing suggested it contained anything extraordinary. Cardboard boxes, old equipment, the kind of forgotten accumulation that fills storage facilities across America. But then he spotted the tapes, DAT cassettes, dozens of them, and on the labels, handwritten in faded ink, two names that made his pulse quicken.

Michael Jackson, Brian Lauren. Musgrove carefully extracted one cassette from its case. The label read MJBL Session 121,990ths. His hands, steady from years of highway patrol work, trembled slightly as he placed it in a portable DAT player he’d brought along. Static, then drums, then a voice he recognized instantly, even though it was speaking, not singing.

Wait, wait, hold up, Brian. That’s the one right there. That’s what I’m hearing. Michael Jackson’s voice, casual and focused, filled the cramped storage space. Another voice responded deeper, more technical. You sure? We can punch that in cleaner on the next pass. No, it’s got feeling this way. Keep it. Musgrove sat on a dusty box and listened.

For the next 20 minutes, he heard something no Michael Jackson fan had ever experienced. the king of pop in his natural creative environment, talking through ideas, joking with his collaborator, building songs piece by piece. The music itself was polished but unfinished. Some tracks had vocals, others were just instrumentals with guide notes, and through it all, that conversation, that unmistakable creative chemistry between two people locked in the process of making something they both believed in.

When the tape ended, Musgrove immediately called an attorney. Notice how storage units work in California. When someone stops paying rent, the facility has legal protocols, notices, grace periods, eventually auction. The contents belong to whoever buys them, but any copyrights or intellectual property rights remain with the original creator.

Musgrove knew he’d stumbled into a legal gray area worth potentially millions of dollars. Over the following weeks, he and his attorney cataloged everything. 16 tapes total. 12 contained unreleased songs. The others held alternate takes, instrumental versions, and what appeared to be work in progress mixes.

The recording dates ranged from late 1989 through early 1991, placing them squarely in the pre-dangerous era when Michael Jackson was experimenting with new sounds and new collaborators. Brian Laurens’s name kept appearing. Musgrove started researching. Lauren was a producer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who’d worked with major artists throughout the late 80s and early 90s.

He’d produced Do the Bartman for the Simpsons. He’d collaborated with Whitney Houston, Sting, Barry White, and apparently for a brief but intense period, he’d worked extensively with Michael Jackson, but then the trail went cold. Laurens’s last verified professional credits dated to the mid90s.

His social media presence was non-existent. industry contacts. Musgrove reached out to either hadn’t heard from him in decades or didn’t know where he was. It was as if Brian Lauren had simply walked away from the music industry and vanished into private life, which raised the question, why would someone abandon a storage unit containing potential musical gold? The tapes themselves offered clues, though no clear answers.

On one recording, Michael and Brian discussed a song called Don’t Believe It, which seemed to address media rumors swirling around Jackson at the time. The lyrics pushed back against tabloid narratives. The music had a defensive edge, angry and defiant in ways that never made it onto Dangerous. Another track, Truth on Youth, featured what sounded like a rap verse.

Musk Gro’s research suggested it might have been a collaboration with LL Cool J, though he couldn’t confirm it without access to industry archives. The song dealt with generational conflict and street life. Themes Michael rarely explored so directly. Seven Digits was darker still. On the tape, Michael’s voice explained the concept to Brian.

It’s about the number they give you in the morg. Your whole life reduced to seven digits. That’s what I want people to feel. These weren’t the polished, commercially optimized tracks that eventually appeared on Dangerous. These were raw explorations, ideas that might have been too confrontational, too experimental, or too personal for the massive pop album Michael’s label expected him to deliver.

Remember something about the music industry? In 1990, Michael Jackson was the biggest star on the planet. Thriller had redefined what an album could achieve. Bad had proven he could repeat that success. The pressure for Dangerous to top both was immense. Every decision, every song, every collaboration, every producer carried weight that could mean tens of millions of dollars.

So when Michael ultimately released Dangerous in November 1991, it featured work from Teddy Riley, who brought the new Jack Swing sound that defined the album. Brian Laurens’s name appeared in the credits, but only for a handful of tracks. Most of the material he’d worked on with Michael didn’t make the final cut.

Industry veterans Musgrove spoke with suggested this wasn’t unusual. Michael Jackson recorded prolifically. For every song that made an album, dozens were left in the vault. Producers came and went. Sessions happened and then got shelved when the creative direction shifted. But that didn’t explain why Lauren would pay for a storage unit to house these sessions and then abandon it.

Musgrove’s attorney reached out to the Michael Jackson estate in spring 2024, months before the public learned about the discovery. The presentation was straightforward. Here’s what we have. Here’s how we obtained it. Here’s what we’re offering. The estate could purchase the tapes, ensuring control over this piece of Michael’s legacy.

Musgrove wasn’t asking for an unreasonable sum. He understood the legal complexities. He just wanted fair compensation for the find. The estate’s response came through official letterheads several weeks later. They acknowledged receiving DAT copies, not master recordings of music featuring Michael Jackson. They confirmed those masters were already housed in the estate’s vaults.

They clarified that Musgrove owned the physical tapes he’d found, but the estate retained all copyrights to the recordings and compositions. Therefore, nothing could be done commercially or publicly with the material without the estate’s permission, which they would not be granting. The letter was polite but final. Musgrove could keep the tapes.

He could sell them to a collector, but he could never release the music, never broadcast it, never profit from the actual content. The tapes were simultaneously priceless artifacts and legally worthless commercial properties. Listen to the irony. 12 unreleased Michael Jackson songs captured during one of his most creative periods recorded in conversations that revealed his unfiltered artistic process.

And the world would never hear them, not because they’d been lost, not because they’d been destroyed, but because of copyright law and an estate protecting intellectual property rights. Musgrove went public with the story in December 2024. Major entertainment outlets picked it up. Michael Jackson fan communities exploded with speculation.

What did the songs sound like? How complete were they? Why had the estate refused to acquire them? The estate issued a statement reiterating their position. They emphasized that these weren’t new discoveries from their perspective. The master recordings existed in their archives. What Musgrove had found were copies.

Historically interesting perhaps, but not musically significant to anyone with access to the originals, which raised yet another question. If the estate had the Masters, why hadn’t they released this material? Dangerous had received deluxe reissues. Thriller had gotten the 40th anniversary treatment. Michael’s catalog had been mined extensively since his death in 2009, but these particular Brian Laurens sessions remained locked away.

Was the quality not good enough? Were the themes too controversial, or had they simply been forgotten in the massive archive of unreleased Jackson material? No official answer came. The estate doesn’t explain its creative decisions to the public. Muskro was left holding 16 tapes worth potentially seven figures to the right collector but $0 in commercial value.

He moved them to a secure facility under his attorney’s supervision. Plans were made to approach major auction houses sibies institutions that handle unique pop culture artifacts. The tapes would be sold as historical items, museum pieces, conversation starters for wealthy collectors who understood they were buying something they could own but never truly exploit.

And through all of this, Brian Lauren remained silent, unreachable, missing not in any criminal sense, but absent from the narrative in ways that made the mystery deeper. Stop for a second and consider what it takes to walk away from work like this. These sessions represented months of Lauren’s creative life.

Hours in the studio with one of the greatest artists who ever lived. Collaborations that could have defined his career if they’d been released, and he’d left them in a storage unit he eventually stopped paying for. People close to the music industry offered theories. Maybe Lauren got frustrated when his work didn’t make the album.

Maybe he had a falling out with Michael or the label. Maybe he simply moved on to other projects and forgot about the tapes. Storage units accumulate our abandoned pasts. We rent them with good intentions and then life intervenes. But those theories felt incomplete. Musicians don’t forget sessions with Michael Jackson.

Producers don’t accidentally abandon master tapes. Something else had happened. something that made Brian Lauren decide these recordings weren’t worth retrieving. Musgrove listened to all 16 tapes multiple times. He told reporters that the conversations between Michael and Brian revealed genuine friendship, mutual respect, creative trust.

There was no evidence of conflict or tension. If anything, the sessions sounded collaborative and positive right up until they apparently ended. Michael had moved on to work with Teddy Riley. Dangerous had come together. Brian Lauren had faded from the picture, and these tapes had gone into storage, waiting 34 years for a former highway patrol officer to discover them by chance.

The songs themselves became the subject of intense fan speculation. Don’t believe it was analyzed based on the limited descriptions available. Truth on Youth became a holy grail for collectors who’d heard rumors of the LL CoolJ collaboration, but never had confirmation. Seven Digits took on mythological status as the darkest, most introspective track Michael had ever attempted.

But speculation was all anyone had. The estate wouldn’t release the music. Musgrove couldn’t release the music. And Brian Lauren, wherever he was, remained silent about the work he’d left behind. In late December 2024, a music journalist managed to track down someone who’d worked at the storage facility in the9s. The employee remembered the unit vaguely, said it had been rented under a business name, not Brian Laurens’s personal name.

Payments had come regularly for years, then stopped abruptly around 1997 or 1998. Standard procedure followed. Notices, grace period, eventual auction. So Lauren, or his business entity, had maintained the unit for six or seven years after the sessions ended. That suggested the abandonment wasn’t immediate.

He’d held on to the tapes well into the ’90s before letting them go. What had changed in 1997, what had made material he’d protected for years suddenly not worth protecting. No answers emerged. The journalist’s investigation hit the same dead ends Musgrove had encountered. Brian Lauren existed in public records up to a point, then disappeared into the private sphere that millions of Americans inhabit, living quiet lives away from their professional pasts.

And that might be the truest part of this story. Not every mystery has a dramatic resolution. Not every disappearance involves conspiracy. Sometimes people just step away. They leave their old lives in storage units and move on to whatever comes next. The music industry chews people up. Maybe Brian Lauren had simply decided he’d had enough.

The tapes remained in legal limbo as 2024 turned to 2025. Musgrove fielded offers from collectors. Auction houses evaluated their market value. Entertainment lawyers debated the finer points of copyright versus ownership. And somewhere in the Michael Jackson estates climate controlled vaults, the master recordings of those same 12 songs sat in their own kind of limbo, unreleased for reasons that might be artistic, legal, or simply bureaucratic.

Michael Jackson fans started a petition asking the estate to release the Brian Laurens Sessions. It gained thousands of signatures. The estate didn’t respond. They rarely do. Managing a legacy as massive and complex as Michaelels involves saying no far more often than yes. Every release has to serve the brand, protect the music, and generate revenue.

Obscure pre-dangerous experiments with a producer most people have never heard of don’t fit the strategy. So, the songs remain unheard, the conversations remain private, and Brian Lauren remains wherever he is. carrying knowledge about those sessions that no one else has. What did Michael say during the parts that weren’t recorded? What happened in the studio between takes? Why did certain songs get abandoned while others moved forward? Only Brian knows and he’s not talking.

Musgrove told one interviewer that listening to the tapes gave him goosebumps. Hearing Michael Jackson talk and joke. Hearing him work through ideas in real time made the legend feel human. It was Michael without the performance, without the image management, without the barriers that fame had built around him.

Just an artist and his collaborator lost in the work creating something they believed in. That might be what makes these tapes so valuable to collectors and so protected by the estate. They reveal too much. They show the process, the uncertainty, the trial and error that even genius requires. Michael Jackson’s public image was carefully constructed perfection.

These tapes showed the messy reality underneath. And now they exist in permanent suspension. Not lost because Musgrove has them. Not found because the world can’t hear them. Not forgotten because fans know they exist. not remembered because there’s no way to actually engage with them. They’re Schroinger’s music simultaneously present and absent, meaningful and meaningless, depending on your perspective.

If you enjoyed spending this time here, I’d be grateful if you’d consider subscribing. A simple like also helps more than you’d think. The auction will happen eventually. Someone will pay six or seven figures for 16 Di tapes they can’t legally exploit. They’ll own a piece of history they can never fully experience.

And the real story, why Brian Lauren walked away, what Michael thought when those sessions ended, whether these songs were masterpieces or interesting failures, will remain locked in silence, protected by copyright law and the absence of the one person who could explain it all. If you want to hear what other mysteries might be hiding in Michael Jackson’s archives, tell me in the comments.

 

 

 

Producer Bryan Loren Recorded 12 Songs With MJ in 1990 — Then Disappeared, Left $7M in Storage

 

$7 million in unreleased Michael Jackson music sat forgotten in a Van NY storage unit for 34 years because the man who recorded it disappeared without paying the rent. Notice because when treasure hunter Greg Musgrove finally opened that unit in December 2024, he found something worth more than money. Conversations, laughter, and the answer to a mystery the music industry couldn’t solve.

The discovery happened on a Tuesday in early December 2024. Musgrove, a 56-year-old former California Highway Patrol officer who turned to treasure hunting storage units after retirement, had been contacted by an associate about a unit in the San Fernando Valley. The previous owner had stopped paying rent years ago. The contents had been auctioned off to a buyer who then reached out to Musgrove, knowing his reputation for identifying valuable items in abandoned spaces.

When Musgrove first saw the unit, nothing suggested it contained anything extraordinary. Cardboard boxes, old equipment, the kind of forgotten accumulation that fills storage facilities across America. But then he spotted the tapes, DAT cassettes, dozens of them, and on the labels, handwritten in faded ink, two names that made his pulse quicken.

Michael Jackson, Brian Lauren. Musgrove carefully extracted one cassette from its case. The label read MJBL Session 121,990ths. His hands, steady from years of highway patrol work, trembled slightly as he placed it in a portable DAT player he’d brought along. Static, then drums, then a voice he recognized instantly, even though it was speaking, not singing.

Wait, wait, hold up, Brian. That’s the one right there. That’s what I’m hearing. Michael Jackson’s voice, casual and focused, filled the cramped storage space. Another voice responded deeper, more technical. You sure? We can punch that in cleaner on the next pass. No, it’s got feeling this way. Keep it. Musgrove sat on a dusty box and listened.

For the next 20 minutes, he heard something no Michael Jackson fan had ever experienced. the king of pop in his natural creative environment, talking through ideas, joking with his collaborator, building songs piece by piece. The music itself was polished but unfinished. Some tracks had vocals, others were just instrumentals with guide notes, and through it all, that conversation, that unmistakable creative chemistry between two people locked in the process of making something they both believed in.

When the tape ended, Musgrove immediately called an attorney. Notice how storage units work in California. When someone stops paying rent, the facility has legal protocols, notices, grace periods, eventually auction. The contents belong to whoever buys them, but any copyrights or intellectual property rights remain with the original creator.

Musgrove knew he’d stumbled into a legal gray area worth potentially millions of dollars. Over the following weeks, he and his attorney cataloged everything. 16 tapes total. 12 contained unreleased songs. The others held alternate takes, instrumental versions, and what appeared to be work in progress mixes.

The recording dates ranged from late 1989 through early 1991, placing them squarely in the pre-dangerous era when Michael Jackson was experimenting with new sounds and new collaborators. Brian Laurens’s name kept appearing. Musgrove started researching. Lauren was a producer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who’d worked with major artists throughout the late 80s and early 90s.

He’d produced Do the Bartman for the Simpsons. He’d collaborated with Whitney Houston, Sting, Barry White, and apparently for a brief but intense period, he’d worked extensively with Michael Jackson, but then the trail went cold. Laurens’s last verified professional credits dated to the mid90s.

His social media presence was non-existent. industry contacts. Musgrove reached out to either hadn’t heard from him in decades or didn’t know where he was. It was as if Brian Lauren had simply walked away from the music industry and vanished into private life, which raised the question, why would someone abandon a storage unit containing potential musical gold? The tapes themselves offered clues, though no clear answers.

On one recording, Michael and Brian discussed a song called Don’t Believe It, which seemed to address media rumors swirling around Jackson at the time. The lyrics pushed back against tabloid narratives. The music had a defensive edge, angry and defiant in ways that never made it onto Dangerous. Another track, Truth on Youth, featured what sounded like a rap verse.

Musk Gro’s research suggested it might have been a collaboration with LL Cool J, though he couldn’t confirm it without access to industry archives. The song dealt with generational conflict and street life. Themes Michael rarely explored so directly. Seven Digits was darker still. On the tape, Michael’s voice explained the concept to Brian.

It’s about the number they give you in the morg. Your whole life reduced to seven digits. That’s what I want people to feel. These weren’t the polished, commercially optimized tracks that eventually appeared on Dangerous. These were raw explorations, ideas that might have been too confrontational, too experimental, or too personal for the massive pop album Michael’s label expected him to deliver.

Remember something about the music industry? In 1990, Michael Jackson was the biggest star on the planet. Thriller had redefined what an album could achieve. Bad had proven he could repeat that success. The pressure for Dangerous to top both was immense. Every decision, every song, every collaboration, every producer carried weight that could mean tens of millions of dollars.

So when Michael ultimately released Dangerous in November 1991, it featured work from Teddy Riley, who brought the new Jack Swing sound that defined the album. Brian Laurens’s name appeared in the credits, but only for a handful of tracks. Most of the material he’d worked on with Michael didn’t make the final cut.

Industry veterans Musgrove spoke with suggested this wasn’t unusual. Michael Jackson recorded prolifically. For every song that made an album, dozens were left in the vault. Producers came and went. Sessions happened and then got shelved when the creative direction shifted. But that didn’t explain why Lauren would pay for a storage unit to house these sessions and then abandon it.

Musgrove’s attorney reached out to the Michael Jackson estate in spring 2024, months before the public learned about the discovery. The presentation was straightforward. Here’s what we have. Here’s how we obtained it. Here’s what we’re offering. The estate could purchase the tapes, ensuring control over this piece of Michael’s legacy.

Musgrove wasn’t asking for an unreasonable sum. He understood the legal complexities. He just wanted fair compensation for the find. The estate’s response came through official letterheads several weeks later. They acknowledged receiving DAT copies, not master recordings of music featuring Michael Jackson. They confirmed those masters were already housed in the estate’s vaults.

They clarified that Musgrove owned the physical tapes he’d found, but the estate retained all copyrights to the recordings and compositions. Therefore, nothing could be done commercially or publicly with the material without the estate’s permission, which they would not be granting. The letter was polite but final. Musgrove could keep the tapes.

He could sell them to a collector, but he could never release the music, never broadcast it, never profit from the actual content. The tapes were simultaneously priceless artifacts and legally worthless commercial properties. Listen to the irony. 12 unreleased Michael Jackson songs captured during one of his most creative periods recorded in conversations that revealed his unfiltered artistic process.

And the world would never hear them, not because they’d been lost, not because they’d been destroyed, but because of copyright law and an estate protecting intellectual property rights. Musgrove went public with the story in December 2024. Major entertainment outlets picked it up. Michael Jackson fan communities exploded with speculation.

What did the songs sound like? How complete were they? Why had the estate refused to acquire them? The estate issued a statement reiterating their position. They emphasized that these weren’t new discoveries from their perspective. The master recordings existed in their archives. What Musgrove had found were copies.

Historically interesting perhaps, but not musically significant to anyone with access to the originals, which raised yet another question. If the estate had the Masters, why hadn’t they released this material? Dangerous had received deluxe reissues. Thriller had gotten the 40th anniversary treatment. Michael’s catalog had been mined extensively since his death in 2009, but these particular Brian Laurens sessions remained locked away.

Was the quality not good enough? Were the themes too controversial, or had they simply been forgotten in the massive archive of unreleased Jackson material? No official answer came. The estate doesn’t explain its creative decisions to the public. Muskro was left holding 16 tapes worth potentially seven figures to the right collector but $0 in commercial value.

He moved them to a secure facility under his attorney’s supervision. Plans were made to approach major auction houses sibies institutions that handle unique pop culture artifacts. The tapes would be sold as historical items, museum pieces, conversation starters for wealthy collectors who understood they were buying something they could own but never truly exploit.

And through all of this, Brian Lauren remained silent, unreachable, missing not in any criminal sense, but absent from the narrative in ways that made the mystery deeper. Stop for a second and consider what it takes to walk away from work like this. These sessions represented months of Lauren’s creative life.

Hours in the studio with one of the greatest artists who ever lived. Collaborations that could have defined his career if they’d been released, and he’d left them in a storage unit he eventually stopped paying for. People close to the music industry offered theories. Maybe Lauren got frustrated when his work didn’t make the album.

Maybe he had a falling out with Michael or the label. Maybe he simply moved on to other projects and forgot about the tapes. Storage units accumulate our abandoned pasts. We rent them with good intentions and then life intervenes. But those theories felt incomplete. Musicians don’t forget sessions with Michael Jackson.

Producers don’t accidentally abandon master tapes. Something else had happened. something that made Brian Lauren decide these recordings weren’t worth retrieving. Musgrove listened to all 16 tapes multiple times. He told reporters that the conversations between Michael and Brian revealed genuine friendship, mutual respect, creative trust.

There was no evidence of conflict or tension. If anything, the sessions sounded collaborative and positive right up until they apparently ended. Michael had moved on to work with Teddy Riley. Dangerous had come together. Brian Lauren had faded from the picture, and these tapes had gone into storage, waiting 34 years for a former highway patrol officer to discover them by chance.

The songs themselves became the subject of intense fan speculation. Don’t believe it was analyzed based on the limited descriptions available. Truth on Youth became a holy grail for collectors who’d heard rumors of the LL CoolJ collaboration, but never had confirmation. Seven Digits took on mythological status as the darkest, most introspective track Michael had ever attempted.

But speculation was all anyone had. The estate wouldn’t release the music. Musgrove couldn’t release the music. And Brian Lauren, wherever he was, remained silent about the work he’d left behind. In late December 2024, a music journalist managed to track down someone who’d worked at the storage facility in the9s. The employee remembered the unit vaguely, said it had been rented under a business name, not Brian Laurens’s personal name.

Payments had come regularly for years, then stopped abruptly around 1997 or 1998. Standard procedure followed. Notices, grace period, eventual auction. So Lauren, or his business entity, had maintained the unit for six or seven years after the sessions ended. That suggested the abandonment wasn’t immediate.

He’d held on to the tapes well into the ’90s before letting them go. What had changed in 1997, what had made material he’d protected for years suddenly not worth protecting. No answers emerged. The journalist’s investigation hit the same dead ends Musgrove had encountered. Brian Lauren existed in public records up to a point, then disappeared into the private sphere that millions of Americans inhabit, living quiet lives away from their professional pasts.

And that might be the truest part of this story. Not every mystery has a dramatic resolution. Not every disappearance involves conspiracy. Sometimes people just step away. They leave their old lives in storage units and move on to whatever comes next. The music industry chews people up. Maybe Brian Lauren had simply decided he’d had enough.

The tapes remained in legal limbo as 2024 turned to 2025. Musgrove fielded offers from collectors. Auction houses evaluated their market value. Entertainment lawyers debated the finer points of copyright versus ownership. And somewhere in the Michael Jackson estates climate controlled vaults, the master recordings of those same 12 songs sat in their own kind of limbo, unreleased for reasons that might be artistic, legal, or simply bureaucratic.

Michael Jackson fans started a petition asking the estate to release the Brian Laurens Sessions. It gained thousands of signatures. The estate didn’t respond. They rarely do. Managing a legacy as massive and complex as Michaelels involves saying no far more often than yes. Every release has to serve the brand, protect the music, and generate revenue.

Obscure pre-dangerous experiments with a producer most people have never heard of don’t fit the strategy. So, the songs remain unheard, the conversations remain private, and Brian Lauren remains wherever he is. carrying knowledge about those sessions that no one else has. What did Michael say during the parts that weren’t recorded? What happened in the studio between takes? Why did certain songs get abandoned while others moved forward? Only Brian knows and he’s not talking.

Musgrove told one interviewer that listening to the tapes gave him goosebumps. Hearing Michael Jackson talk and joke. Hearing him work through ideas in real time made the legend feel human. It was Michael without the performance, without the image management, without the barriers that fame had built around him.

Just an artist and his collaborator lost in the work creating something they believed in. That might be what makes these tapes so valuable to collectors and so protected by the estate. They reveal too much. They show the process, the uncertainty, the trial and error that even genius requires. Michael Jackson’s public image was carefully constructed perfection.

These tapes showed the messy reality underneath. And now they exist in permanent suspension. Not lost because Musgrove has them. Not found because the world can’t hear them. Not forgotten because fans know they exist. not remembered because there’s no way to actually engage with them. They’re Schroinger’s music simultaneously present and absent, meaningful and meaningless, depending on your perspective.

If you enjoyed spending this time here, I’d be grateful if you’d consider subscribing. A simple like also helps more than you’d think. The auction will happen eventually. Someone will pay six or seven figures for 16 Di tapes they can’t legally exploit. They’ll own a piece of history they can never fully experience.

And the real story, why Brian Lauren walked away, what Michael thought when those sessions ended, whether these songs were masterpieces or interesting failures, will remain locked in silence, protected by copyright law and the absence of the one person who could explain it all. If you want to hear what other mysteries might be hiding in Michael Jackson’s archives, tell me in the comments.