10 albums that artists apologised for making
Making any album should be a labour of love for everyone involved. Whereas most people don’t usually get the chance to get their songs into the studio, it’s normally a privilege for anyone to slave away as long as the album holds up in retrospect. No one goes into work to make anything half-hearted, but artists like Stevie Nicks had to admit when some albums didn’t hold a candle to what they could do on their best day.
Then again, an artist’s definition of bad and the listener’s definition of bad are typically two separate things. It’s hard for any artist to divorce themselves from the long hours they spent in the studio trying to make everything work out, so when something doesn’t meet their creative standards, it’s always going to hurt worse than the people who only picked the album up and started listening for the first time.
But even by most people’s standards for what rock and roll is supposed to be, there’s a reason why most bands look on their worst records with disdain. Whereas some people are living under some kind of delusion where they wonder if there’s any moment where they possibly went wrong, there are others that can’t help but listen to the record and feel a sour taste in their mouths afterwards, either thinking that it had no personality or it wasn’t nearly the album it was supposed to be.
Are these albums the worst records of all time? Not necessarily, but they are at least a good look at what makes the musicians in question tick in some way. Because if they think that the work they made was bad enough to warrant an apology, there’s a good chance that they are looking at the bigger picture of their discography rather than every note that they played on the final product.
10 albums that artists apologised for making:
Relationship of Command – At the Drive In
Some albums aren’t meant to be an entertaining experience from back to front. There are many artists who seek to make catchy tunes, but the best albums of all time tend to assault the senses more than a few times over before they are ready to be appreciated. And while At the Drive-In are usually more than up for making some genuinely caustic music, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez does have a bone to pick with some of the best albums in his discography.
Although the guitarist has made numerous songs that sound like total anarchy, he has always felt bad about the way that he contributed to Relationship of Command. The whole thing sounds like it’s about the bounce off the walls the same way that old-school Stooges records do, but when it was put into the hands of production guru Andy Wallace, Rodriguez-Lopez felt the band lost a vital part of their sound.
Compared to what they had recorded, a song like ‘One-Armed Scissor’ was mixed so pristinely that the guitarist refused to listen to the album for years because it wasn’t what he heard in his head. Which often begs the question: if this is what the sanitised version of the band sounded like, what the hell did he have in store if he decided to unleash his true potential on the rest of the world?
Encore – Eminem
Every Eminem project from the beginning was made to try to outdo what he had done before. The Slim Shady LP already introduced us to the zany white trash character that Marshall Mathers always carried with him, but The Eminem Show was the first time he had the size and scope to make one of the best albums of his generation. But when he lit up the stage one more time to grab the microphone, the pills managed to get the better of him once he started spitting Encore.
Then again, he does have at least a little bit of a mulligan here. Most of Encore was recorded in a drug-induced haze, and once the album got leaked, Em spent most of his bars trying to troll his audience by laughing in their face for liking stupid songs. But even the most hardcore Eminem fan couldn’t defend some of these songs, especially when the hooks get downright annoying when he sings songs like ‘Just Lose It’ and ‘Big Weenie’ and had the gall to make the former a single from the record.
And to his credit, Em did seem to listen to what his haters had to say, even saying on Recovery that Encore doesn’t count as a core part of his discography since he was on drugs the entire time. Still, even if he was going through some of the darkest parts of his personal life, that doesn’t make the album any less excruciating to go through on repeated listens.
Just Push Play – Aerosmith
Aerosmith really committed to a Faustian bargain when they earned themselves their first number-one record. ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’ is a fantastic song that deserves to be among the finest ballads in their discography, but if something that star-studded made it to the Oscars, surely more ballads would be their ticket to success, right? Well, as the rest of the band would tell you, that answer is a resounding ‘NO’ if you listen to a good chunk of what ended up on Just Push Play.
Much of the album is focused on the band trying to reposition themselves as pop artist, and while that might work for a crossover with Run-DMC, it only looks embarrassing here, especially when they’re coming in with production that sounds like it was rejected from a boy-band album from the same time. And when Joe Perry was asked about it, he couldn’t even pretend to be on board with some of the ideas Tyler was coming up with.
Throughout the next few years, Perry would spend time saying that he wanted nothing to do with the record and that follow-up singles like ‘Girls of Summer’ were far from the kind of music he wanted to be making. Honkin’ On Bobo was the kind of record that helped get them back to sounding like a rock and roll band, but you know an album severely cratered when they have to make an entire apology record for it.
Pinkerton – Weezer
Weezer has always been at their best when they are being themselves. The nerd-rock icons never claimed to be the rock gods when they first started, and even though many people would love to live out their rockstar fantasies, having Rivers Cuomo sing about Dungeons and Dragons over chunky rock and roll guitars was just what a lot of people needed to hear. Cuomo did have a line for how much he wanted to share, though, and he didn’t realise that line existed until he went well beyond it on Pinkerton.
Throughout the band’s second record, Cuomo is painfully honest about some of the gory details of his personal life, which isn’t always the best to hear. ‘Across the Sea’ feels a little too invasive on his love life, and ‘El Scorcho’ is a vain attempt to avoid talking to girls, but when you think about the kind of audience that he was writing for, Cuomo had the exact right approach to encapsulate that kind of angst. When no one liked it, though, the frontman realised he had made a terrible mistake.
Despite Pinkerton becoming a landmark album in the world of emo music, Cuomo has since called the record “hideous” and said that he would never want to enter that dark mind state ever again. Much of what he did may have been interesting in the moment, but even with the added praise that the album has received over the years, it’s hard to listen to the lyrics and not get second-hand embarrassment from Cuomo airing out his dirty laundry.
The Black Album – Prince
Prince always seemed to have more music in his head than one man could ever hope to have. ‘The Purple One’ lived and breathed music with every fibre of his being, and while he was more than happy to keep creating, his label didn’t exactly love the idea of him releasing one mammoth album after the next. Right when he seemed to be gearing up for another massive musical statement, though, the musical royal seemed to have found Jesus at the eleventh hour on The Black Album.
While his jet-black album was supposed to be released as a bold look at political affairs, Prince suddenly convinced himself that the record was evil and scrapped the entire thing at the last minute. In lieu of giving it to his record company, Prince went so far as to record an entirely different album, Lovesexy, in its place, which may have been a fair trade-off considering it gifted the world with the song ‘Alphabet St’.
But Prince was a bit more sly with his apology here, eventually hiding an apology in backwards lettering in one of the music videos for the project. The rest of the record would eventually see the light of day when Prince was going through record contract hell with Warner Bros., but it’s saying something when the person responsible for creating the ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker thinks they have made something unholy.
The La’s – The La’s
Towards the beginning of the 1990s, it looked like music was about to turn a corner. The hair metal movement had been going on for far too long, and soon people would be inundated with bands that had a much more organic approach to music and came exclusively from the underground. Yes, the next generation would be dominated by earnest songwriters, but it turned out The La’s could never find the momentum they needed to take their rightful place on the indie rock throne like they should have.
As much as the band’s debut album is a classic of its time, Lee Mavers would have greatly preferred if no one had ever heard of it. Their record company had given the band an ultimatum, and while they decided to play as ramshackle as possible to get the record over with, the finished version was nothing more than a polished demo in Mavers’s mind, which was made all the more embarrassing when he failed to capture the sounds in his head for the rest of his career.
Then again, he might have been fighting a losing battle, considering how much he loved the idea of toying with new studio ideas and eventually elected to make new songs with only certain types of cables and making sure that they captured the dust that was on the guitars. Even if The La’s remained an obscure piece of music history for many, that didn’t discount Mavers’s abilities as a pop music genius.
Katy Lied – Steely Dan
Steely Dan were never going to settle for anything less than perfect whenever they made one of their albums. As far as they could tell, music was about them trying to get the perfect sound on every single instrument, and if that stepped on more than a few studio musicians’ feelings, that was frankly not their problem. But even with some of their finer production details, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker knew which albums would stand the test of time and which ones would be dated in a year.
Although Katy Lied has some phenomenal songs, it was caught between two extremely different pieces of the band’s career. The duo had already begun shying away from touring, but bringing in new production software ended up wrecking the version of the album that they wanted to hear. Instead of the massive soundscape they wanted, they felt that all of the feeling had been sucked dry from the sessions before they could get anything done.
While the liner notes came with a note from the band apologising for the mix issues, it seems that they took notes before going into their next records. Because if The Royal Scam and Aja were any indication, the band were on the verge of making some of the most spotless records that anyone had ever committed to tape.
Street Angel – Stevie Nicks
Stevie Nicks was always going to sing what was on her mind whenever she made a record. She spent the first half of her time in Fleetwood Mac playing second fiddle to her bandmates, and she wasn’t about to be pushed to the side for the rest of her career when she struck out on her own. But while Street Angel had Nicks at the wheel for most of the record, her mind was somewhere else when the final product came out.
She had successfully conquered her battle with addiction, but she had traded that in for a steady prescription drug problem. While she has admitted that she was robbed of nearly a decade of her life to the drug, she freely admits that Street Angel was well below the standard she set for herself. Aside from bringing in production guru Glyn Johns, much of the album feels like Nicks is trying to articulate herself, but is always coming up short for some reason.
‘The Gold Dust Woman’ always admitted that the album was a disaster from back to front in later years, it’s much better for her to be honest about where the album stands. She could have easily made a half-hearted record and called it a masterpiece, but it’s better to have artists who learn from their mistakes every now and then.
Load and ReLoad – Metallica
For the first half of the 1990s, it seemed like Metallica had their cake and ate it in front of the entire world. They had been underground darlings and one of the greatest metal bands of all time for a while, but now with The Black Album under their belt, they had some of the greatest crossover metal songs to go along with it. But when someone tastes that success, they’re only going to want more, and James Hetfield was ready for more when he first started working on the Load records.
While Load and ReLoad are looked back on as sell-out albums by most people, it’s not like they are completely trash from back to front. Each of them shows the band moving in bold new directions they had never tried before, but it’s clear that Hetfield was out of his element a little bit, especially when he tried to sound like a lonesome cowboy on ‘Mama Said’ or making songs that sounded half-hearted like on ‘Attitude’.
The album evokes some genuinely honest emotions, but the fact that Hetfield couldn’t remember which good songs were on each record tells you more about his opinion of them. Some spotty moments were bound to happen in this kind of transition, but if the band made one superalbum with songs from each release, it would have been a worthy follow-up to their blockbuster success.
Songs of Innocence – U2
U2 always prided themselves on entering areas no other rock and roll bands have before. As much as they liked the idea of challenging their audiences, that kind of artistic bravery either endeared them to critics or made them look like one of the most pretentious rock and roll bands that ever lived. So when all of that suddenly backfired, fans let them know before they even heard a note of Songs of Innocence.
Then again, it’s not like Bono didn’t have everyone’s best interests at heart. He wanted to change how people released records in the age of streaming and digital downloads, but the idea of putting the album directly on everyone’s iPhone without asking felt more like a necessary evil. The album itself was actually very good, but it doesn’t bode well when the first thing people are asking is how to get an album they didn’t want off their phone.
And while Bono does have one of the most obvious messiah complexes in rock and roll, he did at least understand where he slipped up and felt that they had made a bad move by using the Big Brother tactic on the record. There are many reasons that people have thrown around as to why they can’t stand U2, but it would be completely understandable if this is the main reason why longtime fans eventually jumped ship.
