A rare glimpse into Life After Death’s original vision has surfaced, shedding light on unreleased tracks and unexpected collaborations. The Instagram account 92 Bricks recently unearthed a tracklist from a January 1997 listening party for Biggie’s now-iconic album—then titled Life After Death… Til Death Do Us Part.
The unearthed tracklist features 28 songs—four more than the final album’s 24. However, one track appears twice, possibly due to a printing error, suggesting the album was originally intended to have 27 songs. More notably, the list reveals five unreleased songs, including “Once Upon a Time” featuring Fat Joe, “Stayin’ Alive,” and untitled tracks produced by RZA, Easy Mo Bee, and the late DJ Clark Kent.
The tracklist also includes “Spanish Fly,” a song that didn’t make the final cut, though it’s speculated to be an early version of the track that later appeared on Black Rob’s 2000 album Life Story. Additionally, some of Life After Death’s most famous tracks initially had different titles. “Comin’ Out” featuring Ma$e eventually became “Mo Money Mo Problems”, which famously sampled Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out”. “Bones Track” evolved into the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony-assisted “Notorious Thugs”, while “Mo Bounce” became the West Coast-flavored “Going Back to Cali”.
Despite the significance of this discovery, the tracklist has not been independently verified by Biggie’s estate or Bad Boy Records.
Fat Joe, whose name appears on one of the unreleased songs, has previously discussed working with Biggie before his tragic passing in 1997. The Bronx rapper even claimed that he and Big were planning an entire collaborative album—one that allegedly contained diss tracks aimed at 2Pac.
“You know I say stuff, Tim, and they always say I lie or I say too much,” Fat Joe told Timbaland during an Instagram Live session in 2021. “You know I worked on an album with Biggie? We cut about five songs together.”
“He was like, ‘You the Latino don, I’m the Black don.’ And we was in that studio going crazy. It’s verified by Puff Daddy and everybody.”
Joe admitted that some of the songs from their sessions aimed Tupac, but he understands why they never saw the light of day, given both artists’ tragic deaths.
With this latest revelation, Hip Hop fans wonder if these lost Life After Death tracks will ever be unearthed or officially released.