As someone who championed Shine Through, this tale is not all that surprising to me. How Aloe presented that album — as a “table of contents” for his career, in his words — makes complete sense in hindsight. However that record apparently only scratches the surface of the levels of his talent, as I began to find out that Aloe has an incredibly huge archive of unreleased albums that show him experimenting with different styles of music.

“You gotta understand, Aloe has always believed that he could do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. That’s part of the reason why he’s an international superstar right now,” says Egon. “It doesn’t mean that Aloe Blacc hasn’t done some things that are completely out of left field, some of which make sense and some which don’t. He’s always done what he believed to be a good idea and never let anyone tell him no. That’s one of the main reasons that he is so successful; he has this unbelievable belief in himself.”

“Aloe has probably done every single genre you could think of in his archive. He never would limit himself,” says Exile, Aloe’s old hip-hop collaborator in Emanon. “Sometimes there would be some ‘What the fuck are you doing, Aloe?’ type songs, but then there is a big handful of just amazing songs. I knew he was on a mission to just do it all. Maybe in a sense where one of them is going to take off, but more so to just create, first and foremost.”

Among these things out of left-field is a mysterious, unreleased “children’s album” that Aloe recorded in 2005 during his tenure at Stones Throw, which he distributed hand-to-hand to his close personal friends. The album has otherwise been kept airtight, as it has not been uploaded to the internet and remains largely undiscovered by fans. Even the ridiculously thorough music archive what.cd has no listing for the children’s record, although it has every other release of his career, along with plenty of unreleased cuts from Dr. Dre’s Detox.

“Yeah, I have a copy of it. This was like that ‘Mr. Squiggles’ thing that he did or whatever it was called, right? Something weird like that, it has a really bad cover. It’s CD only and it’s Aloe’s kid’s record,” says Egon. “It was goofy. If I remember it had pitched up voices, kind of like a Quasimoto type thing for one of the characters.”

“That was one of those albums where it was like ‘Aloe, what the fuck are you doing?’” laughs Exile. “But it was great. It was this really strange, quirky children’s album that he did in a munchkin voice. He’s Mr. Idea, he always has some kind of idea. He’s a risk taker and some of them are strange ideas. To me, that was kind of one of them. I could definitely see kids enjoying it. It will probably need some visuals to go with it.”

As my search for info on the children’s album continued, I began to find out there are in fact several unreleased albums from Aloe in the vaults, as his friends wax poetically about these moments of untapped, unreleased genius.

“One of the albums he turned in was him literally singing over Luis Bonfá, the guy who did the Black Orpheus soundtrack. It might even be the Black Orpheus soundtrack. He took one of his albums and just sang over it,” reveals Egon. “He sang what I would describe as a meeting of American and Brazilian folkloric music. One of the songs on that was ‘It Takes a Village To Raise a Child.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘How in the world would we even clear this?’ But Aloe was like ‘This is one of the things I’m working on.’ I’ve kept a lot of those things as artifacts because you don’t meet people like Aloe very often.”

Exile chimes in: “I also have this other album that is some of his most incredible work under the alias Nathan Yell. It’s a mix of dark, wild west meets gothic, grim reaper meets old gospel hymns. A lot of it was recorded Bobby McFerrin style, by patting his body, beatboxing, humming. It’s real experimental, but I think it’s a really cool album. Eventually I think we plan to expand on it and hopefully release it.”

We found *one* Nathan Yell track, “Goodbye,” from a little heard compilation called From L.A. With Love.

“The guy made a whole bunch of records, man,” says Egon.