10 albums that permanently damaged artists’ careers
Nothing is more important to a band than keeping its momentum.
As much as some bands might love the idea of reinventing themselves every single time they perform, there are bound to be those few others that need to make sure to keep the classics coming before the rest of the world forgets about them. Then again, it’s healthy for all bands to take risks, and while some work out for the best, bands like Pink Floyd were never going to be the same after they finished some of their records.
But not every one of the albums that damages a career needs to be downright terrible. In fact, some of the best albums of all time have this same type of baggage tied to their legacy, and yet the songs themselves have some of the greatest hooks that they ever came out with. If the band had the chance to do everything over again, they would have probably loved to rewrite history a little bit.
Because as much as they might have loved the end result, there were more than a few bruised egos when they left the studio. The art of making a great album does mean stepping on a few people’s toes every now and again, and while most people can let it go for the sake of the music, there had to be some point where they threw their hands up and took a chance without their bandmates on whatever they released afterwards.
Some of them would remain fixtures of the band’s set list to this day, and some might be songs that they never want to revisit again, but you can’t say that they didn’t leave us short of things to talk about. No one plans on staging their own fall from grace, but if these tunes were any indication, their unravelling was a few months in the making.
10 albums that permanently damaged artists’ careers:
Don’t Look Back – Boston
Sometimes success can be as intimidating as failure when a band reaches the big time. There are a lot of people who might love every song that you’re putting out, but the more successful a record is, the more burden there is on you to make something equally as good once you get back into the studio. So when Boston made one of the biggest albums of all time right out of the gate, it became pretty apparent that they had hit the ceiling a little too quickly when working on the next record.
I mean, just look at the title. The band had said that Don’t Look Back was a cheeky dig at how similar they sounded to their first record, but that’s already a huge red flag right out of the gate. Does it have some good songs? Sure, ‘The Man I’ll Never Be’ and the title track are decent rock and roll tunes, but there comes a point when you start listening to the album where you wish that they would make tunes with the same punch as ‘Smokin’ or ‘Foreplay/Long Time’.
Unfortunately, that was never going to come, and even if the band did end up having some decent-sized hits, their legacy would forever be doomed as an AOR mainstay that happened to have one of the greatest-sounding rock and roll albums of all time. It’s one thing to knock it out of the park, but by the time everyone came up for air, it wasn’t long before they started to realise they were listening to a one-trick pony.
Tango in the Night – Fleetwood Mac
The key to all of Fleetwood Mac’s golden-age albums came from the tension between everyone. Rumours may have been filled to the brim with some of the greatest pop-rock songs of the era, but I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some people gawking at all of the relationship drama going on across the album when they picked it up. The whole rock and roll soap opera angle was half of their appeal at the time, but the end of the 1980s was when all that tension finally snapped for good.
Everyone managed to make it through Tango in the Night bravely enough, but the minute that they started planning a tour, Lindsey Buckingham wasn’t ready to go back in again. His relationship with Stevie Nicks had officially deteriorated, and even if Nicks was planning on staying with the band forever, watching them get into a physical fight during one of their band meetings pretty much confirmed that Buckingham was never going to be working with them in any capacity ever again.
Oh, they were still able to pack arenas and have millions of people singing along to their tunes, but even when they were on decent-enough terms for The Dance and Say You Will, you could still sense all those years of tensions ramping up every time they played tracks like ‘Silver Springs’. It was a miracle that they even managed to make it as long as they did, but now that Christine McVie has passed, there’s no way that we’re ever going to get the classic lineup in all its glory again.
MTV Unplugged – Alice in Chains
Most bands would only hope to have one album where they manage to bow out gracefully. Not everyone gets to close a chapter of their life on such a succinct note, and artists like David Bowie have been fortunate to realise when they had reached the end of the line by the time they recorded their swan song. But it’s not often that you see a band like Alice in Chains give a eulogy to one of their members before they have passed on, as they did on their MTV Unplugged appearance.
It was clear that Layne Staley was already in a bad way ever since their self-titled record, but by the time he entered that studio, he looked like a shell of what he once was. While it’s anyone’s guess whether he was going through withdrawals during the show, hearing him sing so candidly about his problems on tunes like ‘Nutshell’ is both beautiful and uncomfortable all at the same time.
The show gives off the impression of something you shouldn’t be listening to, but even if the band was out of commission for years, this is a reminder of the beauty that they created when they had one of the best singers of the grunge era standing alongside them. And whenever they make new records to this day, it’s all done in the service of making music that Staley would have been proud to sing.
The Paper Kingdom – My Chemical Romance
There was never a linear plan for how long My Chemical Romance was supposed to last. If Gerard Way had his way, the band probably would have called it quits right after The Black Parade, and considering they never matched that album’s brilliance, no one would have blamed them for closing up shop. But even if Danger Days was a fun distraction from their dark side, The Paper Kingdom is the first entry on this list that managed to take its toll on the band’s sanity, trying to make it.
And of all the records here, this is the one that you technically can’t listen to. The Paper Kingdom isn’t really an album at all; it’s a schematic for an idea that Way had for the band’s final record that never saw the light of day. In the story of the album, the band would have written songs from the perspective of parents in a support group after losing their children, and each song would have been about them making up a story of their children fighting off an evil witch in a forest.
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of foundation, but Way was the first one to realise that the record was never going to go the distance. He had gone through a terrible headspace getting The Black Parade off the ground, and he wasn’t about to subject himself to writing about dead children, especially since he became a father around the same time. You can’t blame the guy for prioritising his mental health, but in terms of finished songs, ‘Fake Your Death’ is all we’re going to get from their final jams together.
Songs of Innocence – U2
It’s not hard to see why a lot of people end up having a problem with U2. Bono might be one of the few zealots of rock and roll that actually seems to care about the craft, but there are just as many moments throughout the band’s career where they come off as some of the most self-righteous rock and roll stars you have ever seen. And while all of their career moves might be done in service to others, everyone would have been quite happy to deal with Songs of Innocence on their own.
The Irish legends may have had a few bumps in the road before on albums like Pop, but the decision to put their latest record on every iPhone in the world was only going to cause trouble. Kudos to them for recognising a new marketing strategy, but you know that things weren’t turning out well when the most press that the record was getting was the number of people complaining that they couldn’t end up scrubbing the songs from their iTunes library after it came out.
In all fairness, the songs are pretty good, but seeing how the rest of the Songs of… series of albums haven’t turned out all that well, hopefully we don’t have to look at Songs of Innocence as the moment where everything went wrong. Bono has said that there is hope for a balls-to-the-wall rock and roll record for the band’s next outing, but if they end up taking a subdued approach again, they’re going to come dangerously close to having their songs lapped by snails.
Ringo the 4th – Ringo Starr
There’s no real point in trying to make jokes about Ringo Starr’s musicianship anymore. Sure, the man wasn’t planning on being the world’s greatest songwriter, and considering he had some of the greatest songwriters of all time in a band with him, why should he have worried? His solo career would have stayed intact as long as he had a little help from his friends, so it was no surprise that everything tended to go wrong the minute that Starr decided to do everything on his own.
That’s not to say that he didn’t have a good idea with Ringo the 4th. The disco bandwagon hadn’t officially picked up steam, so Starr rebranding himself as a disco king would have been a lot more believable than whatever Mick Jagger was doing when he made ‘Miss You’. But as soon as the stylish suits came out in the video for ‘Drowning in the Sea of Love’, people had to wonder where everything started to go wrong. Starr’s voice simply doesn’t work over these instrumentals, and no matter how hard he tried, songs like ‘Gypsies in Flight’ weren’t up to the standards of anyone remotely associated with The Beatles.
It’s hard to say that the record killed his career by any stretch, but considering he would have to play musical leapfrog with every single record label that he worked with afterwards, it’s not like he was exactly having the time of his life once the record went belly up. In terms of song quality, records like Bad Boy are even worse versions of Starr, but Ringo the 4th is the only album in his catalogue that feels like it’s beyond repair.
Just Push Play – Aerosmith
The entire journey of Aerosmith tends to feel like a backwards evolution for most rock and roll fans. Any band could have hoped to have some of the classic riffs that they came up with in their prime, but as they started to work with outside songwriters, you could see them slowly start to change to the point where they were practically indistinguishable from any other pop act on the radio. That’s not necessarily a bad career choice, but if Get A Grip was the perfect medium, Just Push Play was the point of no return for their poppier tunes.
Aerosmith weren’t exactly cut out to be pin-up stars by any stretch, but it’s not like the album is absolutely terrible from back to front. ‘Beyond Beautiful’ and ‘Jaded’ kick the door down quite nicely, but if you listen to some of the more syrupy ballads like ‘Fly Away From Here’ and especially the standalone single ‘Girls of Summer’, you start to realise that this was more than an experiment. This was what the band had morphed into, and things weren’t about to start looking up, either.
Honkin’ On Bobo fared decently well for a covers record, but by the time they made their final record Music From Another Dimension, it felt like the band had Frankensteined all of their old ideas into something that slightly resembled the band that made ‘Walk This Way’ in the mid-1970s. They didn’t have to keep up their vicious streak by any stretch, but the minute Just Push Play started selling was when every ounce of musical grit was stripped from their bodies.
Use Your Illusion – Guns N’ Roses
By the time Guns N’ Roses reached the top of the charts, they were already moving way too fast. They had spent years trying to get that first record off the ground, and when ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ became the biggest songs of the decade, there was bound to be some anticipation for what was coming next. Everything had to be bigger and better as far as Axl Rose was concerned, but if Use Your Illusion proved anything, it’s that a band can crawl up their ass a little too quickly when they get famous.
Then again, that’s being a little bit mean. Use Your Illusion isn’t a complete dud by any means, but it does have some of the most questionable decisions in their history. Rose’s desire to be a singer-songwriter did have its moments on tunes like ‘November Rain’, but when the rest of the album featured nine-minute piano ballads and some of the most overcooked ideas in the band’s catalogue, you can see why the rest of the band were having a hard time settling into a groove by the time they were finished.
And after losing two band members during the recording and subsequent tour, it didn’t take the rest of them long to walk out on Rose and start working on their own projects. There had been a band called Guns N’ Roses that played badass rock and roll music, but all of that goodwill seemed to be thrown out the minute that Rose started to ditch some shows midway through the tour.
St Anger – Metallica
It’s never easy for any heavy metal band to show their sensitive side. As much as hair metal bands loved their power ballads when they started working the Sunset Strip, the thrash scene never had any time to open themselves up and start talking about their feelings when they made records. But Metallica were always ones to go against the grain, and opening themselves up to the world on St Anger and especially Some Kind of Monster proved to be one of the biggest mixed blessings in rock and roll history.
On one hand, though, it was nice to see all of them getting along a lot better by the end of the movie. There was a good chance that James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich were going to pull the plug on the entire operation halfway through the album sessions, but after slaving away, they finally found a way to get on solid ground and keep the band going. The rest of the album may have sounded like heavy metal diarrhoea on every other track, but the icy reception to the record also seemed to scare them into submission.
Because ever since Death Magnetic, the band have elected to play it safe on each record, usually pumping out tunes that fit somewhere in between their thrash beginnings and The Black Album era. That might be the highest-selling era of their career, but when one of the most reviled albums of your career suddenly convinces you to stop taking any kind of creative risk, that’s not exactly a net positive by any stretch.
The Wall – Pink Floyd
By the time that Roger Waters finished Dark Side of the Moon, all of his relationships with his bandmates were practically over. He had washed his hands of Pink Floyd as a creative entity, and as long as David Gilmour kept coming out with the greatest music of all time, he would only serve as the conceptualist behind everything they did. But for someone who led the band for a decade, Waters found out the hard way that he could bite off a little more than he could chew on The Wall.
No one really had a problem with Waters’s concepts up until this point, but since he needed everything to be perfect, he wasn’t going to compromise anymore. This rock opera was going to take everything he did and amplify it to the nth degree, and he wasn’t afraid to step on everyone’s toes while he did it, eventually firing Richard Wright halfway through the album and having a session drummer come in to record drum parts that Nick Mason thought he couldn’t pull off.
The creative partnership was officially ruined, but the derailment goes far beyond David Gilmour carrying on without Waters. The bassist had made some of the most thoughtful records in the rock canon, and thanks to lawsuits, verbal spats, and going so far as to re-record some of his older material, Waters seems to be going out of his way to smother all the goodwill of the band that he once led.
