10 artists that have released way too many albums

Weezer

For context, this entry is more of a public service announcement than a critique of Weezer. All told, the nerd rock icons don’t have too many albums for a band that started over 30 years ago, and their track record has put them in the green more than a few times. But when looking at the rapid pace in which they put music out, you have to wonder whether their production schedule is doing them more harm than good whenever they walk into the studio.

Because as much as people have fond memories of The Blue Album and Pinkerton, the real issue comes when looking at their late 2000s run. After gaining some momentum off of ‘Beverly Hills’, the band decided to go for a rapid-fire release schedule, usually coming out with an album a year while touring, which led to some of the most widespread hate for any of their records when they got to Raditude. And right when they seemed to learn their lesson in 2014, they ended up doing it all over again in the 2010s.

The run from Pacific Daydream and The Black Album is far from a step down compared to their usual method, but considering they have had significantly less output in the 2020s, it’s nice to see that they’re learning from their mistakes. Because had they kept following trends, Cuomo was eventually going to get on the K-pop bandwagon, and there was no real need to hear the same guy who wrote half-Japanese girls doing it for him to hop on that trend any time soon.

Grateful Dead

Grateful Dead have always felt more like a state of mind than a band half the time. Whenever you listen to their records, it’s all about the music transporting someone to a different place and letting the music carry them throughout every minute of a guitar solo. Plenty of jam bands have copied that schtick before, but the Dead albums that they’ve accumulated over the years are gargantuan, and yet it has absolutely nothing to do with their studio discography.

Because while 13 studio albums is pretty respectable for a standard rock and roll, ‘The Dead’ were always a much different animal live. That’s where their music truly thrived, but if you thought Live/Dead was the extent of their work onstage, you have yet to unearth the vast catalogue of bootleg recordings. Whereas most acts like to bootleg their shows, ‘The Dead’s bootlegging history goes well into the 200 range, showing different takes on all of their classic tunes.

It’s nice to see how they evolve from show to show, but when looking at the logistics, no one’s going to be looking at how their performance in 1981 differed from their performance of the same track back in 1974. It does give listeners an encyclopedic knowledge of everything the band could do, but looking at the amount of albums that they released of their shows is enough for any completionist to softly cry into their pillow every night.

Snoop Dogg

There’s never a bad reason to have Snoop Dogg around. Yes, he may have risen to prominence as one of the most in-demand gangsta rappers alive, but whether he’s working with pop starlets, art rockers, or his own solo joints, you can usually expect a solid verse every time he steps up to the mic. Rarely has someone been able to come off as innately lovable as he is whenever he gets on a track, but too much Snoop Dogg all at once is enough to give someone too much of a contact high.

While Snoop has been fairly consistent ever since Doggystyle in terms of release schedule, the real problem centres around all the mixtapes that he’s put out since then. Doing the math, the man has made more mixtapes than mainline studio albums, which were frankly being pumped out at an alarming rate once he hit the 2000s, especially in 2003 when he ended up putting out four different mixtapes and yet still found time to release R&G: The Masterpiece and take a victory lap on ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’.

That’s before you even get to the collaboration albums as well, including collaborations with Nate Dogg, Wiz Khalifa, and creating a rap supergroup with E-40 and Ice Cube. Dogg may have been able to get into show business thanks to the help of Dr Dre, but since his mentor never released much since 2001 outside of a soundtrack album, maybe Snoop is making up for the lost albums that his musical big brother hasn’t made.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

All great art rock is about challenging the status quo. As much as people like the idea of hearing a guitar riff that has the potential to melt brains, there are always going to be musicians that go outside the norm and give us the music we didn’t know we even wanted. It could be outlandish like Talking Heads or batshit insane like Black Midi, but King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard somehow want to do every genre under the sun in the length of time it takes most of us to make ourselves a sandwich.

Granted, the band do have an impressive track record for making fantastic music on each record, but their habit of making every single album as fast as possible is too overwhelming to keep track of. There might be some fans that gravitate towards the classics like Nonagon Infinity, but there are also a handful of tunes that are nice palette cleansers as well, like when they go from a hard rock shredfest to a tropical rock and roll experience.

If anything, the fact that King Gizzard has had too many albums since starting in the 2010s is practically a complement. We now live in a world where records have the potential to be forgotten past the weekend of release, but as long as they keep switching things up, they have somehow cracked the code for becoming musically immortal.

Drake

No hip-hop fan is a stranger to a long album. The whole point of the greatest rap records of all time is to make the listener hear a tapestry of different sounds hitting them at one time, and even if it rounds out to over an hour, it’s never that much of an issue when the lyricism is solid. But for someone like Drake that spends his entire life trying to make sad-boy party music, there comes a point where everyone is going to want to leave that party and never come back after one too many visits.

It’s not like he didn’t start off in a good place, though. Mr Graham’s first few records did at least have some great melodies to go around, and if we ignore how obvious the Kanye West worship was, there were places where things could grow. But once he started looking at his albums like playlists, the whole thing simply stopped sounding like music and more like the strange background noise that everyone hears when they go shopping.

And it doesn’t help that a lot of his songs for the last few years include him “borrowing” some other artist’s sound and trying to look cool by adopting it wholeheartedly. That works when it’s someone like David Bowie that embodies the music, but in the case of Drake, every other record feels like him trying to wear music like a costume in the hopes that everyone will get the mainstream version of whatever music he’s selling.

Johnny Cash

The entire country music genre has never been a stranger to large discographies. If you look at everyone from Dolly Parton to Willie Nelson, they have kept releasing albums through the sheer love of doing it, and it’s not uncommon for their discographies to go well beyond anything their contemporaries have done. But in the case of Johnny Cash, it’s almost a strange anomaly trying to pick out which sections of his career are the best.

Despite one of the biggest albums of his career being a live record, ‘The Man in Black’ was always an intimidating presence whenever he made a new album. While most people might not be looking to listen to his turns towards making gospel music or singing the country songs of yesteryear, never has an artist been able to make some of their best music both at the very beginning and the very end of their career.

While The Highwaymen was an interesting detour for Cash, the sheer volume of his records with Rick Rubin are a testament to how much renewed energy he had towards the end of his life, to the point where more records have come out posthumously featuring unheard takes of his classics. So whether you know him for his tales from Folsom Prison, singing alongside Willie Nelson, or the heartbreaking video from ‘Hurt’, Cash practically ticked off bucket-list achievements in every single generation.

Prince

The amount of talent Prince had in his body was truly too much for one man. He had so much material in his mind that any other artist would die for, and yet when looking through his discography, there isn’t much that he didn’t cover when going through his core lineup of classics. And yet, when looking at the sheer volume that he released, he had so much more lined up than any artist reasonably should.

Everyone has fond memories of everything from 1999 to Sign o’ The Times, but the 1990s is where he truly went on an insane run of albums. He may have been doing everything to fulfill his contract, but even when celebrating his musical rebirth on Emancipation, he was making far too much music for anyone to properly digest, especially with a triple album and a box set of music that rounded out to over 3 hours of music each. And if that wasn’t enough, he would also include other bonus albums amongst his records for funsies, like the all-acoustic album The Truth or including records by his musical proteges.

And the most frightening part? Prince wasn’t even pretending to be finished by the time of his death, even mentioning the countless songs that he still has in his vault that have yet to see the light of day. Having 40 mainline albums within one’s discography is already a daunting task for any newcomer, but what’s even crazier is releasing that we might be dealing with an incomplete number of records.

Elvis Presley

‘The King of Rock and Roll’ really doesn’t need any sort of introduction. Throughout every facet of his career, Elvis Presley embodied everything that rock and roll stood for, and whether he was singing straight blues, the occasional country tune, or even gospel music, everyone was standing at attention the minute they heard his breathtaking voice. However, while one million Elvis fans can’t be wrong, I draw the line when he started to get an idea to make that many albums during his lifetime.

Sure, there are going to be the stand-by records that everyone goes back to like The Sun Sessions and his self-titled record, but the lion’s share of Presley’s albums were happening so fast you’d swear they came off an assembly line. All of them may have been filled to the brim with hits, but since Presley came from the singles market half the time, a lot of his best material ended up sounding closer to a collection of great 45s rather than the kind of grandiose statements everyone else was making.

But fear not Presley completionists. We also have access to the Follow That Dream archives, which preserved all 271 records that Presley made throughout his lifetime for your listening pleasure. There’s no shame in being an avid fan of Presley, but the minute that someone gets finished listening to all of those records, they shouldn’t be surprised when their lip curls and they suddenly adopt a slicked-back haircut out of the blue.

Frank Zappa

There was no way Frank Zappa was ever going to apologise for his approach to rock and roll. Not all of it was the most radio-friendly music in the world, but his work with the Mothers of Invention continued to inspire legions of fans that were always slightly curious about what the artsy side of rock and roll could be. If you’re willing to enter the wonderful wacky world of Zappa, though, you either have to know where to look first or jump in during any part of his 60-album run completely blind.

Even if Zappa had a good track record for making musical masterpieces, his music isn’t going to be for everybody. A lot of his best moments do have pieces that resemble a hook in the records, but he wasn’t playing that kind of game most of the time. He wanted to make a musical epiphany go off in people’s heads even if he happened to be making profane jokes throughout records like Joe’s Garage.

To his credit, not one of his albums sounds the same, but it is more than a little bit daunting trying to work your way through every piece of the man’s mind. Not everything is going to make sense, and it’s going to go into a lot of weird places most of the time, but a lot of his best albums are the musical equivalent of eating vegetables when you were a kid. They might not taste that good, but it’s good for you.

Buckethead

The beauty of a guitarist like Buckethead is being able to play by his own rules. The art of the virtuoso guitar player always comes back to whatever music they want to make, so there’s usually no real limit on what kind of album you can make with the right band behind you. It all comes down to one’s sense of imagination, and given how many albums he has released, Buckethead’s imagination should truly be studied to understand the kind of music that he puts out.

While there are some spellbinding moments that people single out for a reason like ‘Jordan’, the albums he has had a hand in are too much to narrow down. 31 is already an astonishing number of records for someone who got their start in the early 1990s, but the Pike series of albums is where it truly gets insane. The series of mini-albums he released had begun in 2011, but even for someone that has a massive turnaround for standard albums, the tally rounds up to over 650 albums in his entire discography.

Anyone would give their left arm to have that kind of musical drive, but on second thought, that kind of mind should only come once every generation. And judging by his insane track record, chances are he’s going to have another album out in the time it takes you to read the rest of this sentence.