10 times great singers left amazing bands to make terrible albums

‘Soul Punk’ – Patrick Stump

Before the days when they were the rock and roll version of Maroon 5, there was a lot to like about Fall Out Boy. Sure, their song titles could get a bit long and Pete Wentz’s lyrics could get more than a little bit odd, but whenever Patrick Stump stepped up to the microphone, no one could deny that the dude had some pipes on him. He was practically a soul version of a punk rocker, but while the idea sounds like a nice collage in theory, it worked out a lot differently in practice.

Then again, many of Stump’s melodies haven’t changed much from the core Fall Out Boy discography. He can still belt to the high heavens and go for whatever mood he wants to, but what’s lacking on this album is the songs. Wentz was far from a musical genius by any stretch, but putting his lyrics next to Stump’s generic attempts at songs makes a lot of Fall Out Boy’s main material feel like listening to one of the most sophisticated bands of all time.

While there are no doubt some fans who fawn over Stump’s voice whenever they hear it in practice, this isn’t really the kind of music that’s going to change someone’s life in high school. It’s the music that plays over the loudspeakers in a department store as you’re looking for whatever hot summer deal is available.

‘Son of Albert’ – Andrew Ridgeley

Duos are always a tricky thing to master. As much as it might be freeing to only need to worry about one person in a group, that usually only makes the heart grow more eager for being a solo artist after a while. And despite everyone knowing that George Michael was about to be the breakout star out of Wham!, there was always going to be a little bit of sympathy towards Andrew Ridgeley when he decided to gracefully bow out.

After all, he had been on all those classic songs too, and he had even helped Michael when he took his first steps into writing, but when listening to his attempt at a solo career, there’s no reason to think that he was giving his old mate a run for his money. A lot of this covers the kind of soulful music that Wham! had been known for, but without that soaring voice over top of everything, most people were staying home, with most reviewers either not being impressed or ignoring it entirely.

And since Michael had already started to move on to other projects by the early 1990s, Ridgeley’s solo career feels more like a novelty or a massive nostalgia bomb for people who still held Make It Big close to their chests. To his credit, though, Ridgeley has never seemed bitter about his place in the world, either. He feels content to have conquered the world with his old mate once, and if he couldn’t do it again, so be it.

‘The Controversy’ – Zac Brown

There aren’t really too many major solo acts in country music that break out of a band. There’s the occasional supergroup like The Highwaymen, but no one’s sitting around wondering what bands Willie Nelson played in before he hit it big or the kind of people that Dolly Parton played with in her pre-’Jolene’ days. So, really, Zac Brown Band is a one-off in the modern sense by actually sounding like a band, but the idea of him going solo and into electronica made absolutely zero sense.

Everyone already had cold feet listening to his version of EDM with his project Sir Rosevelt, but when he decided to pull a Tom Petty and make an album without the rest of his band, it felt like the biggest genre clusterfuck anyone had ever heard. It’s one thing to be willing to try out other genres, but hearing a song like ‘Swayze’ is usually enough for even the most open country fan to turn the record off and never listen to it again.

Then again, the fact that Brown thought enough of the record to change the album art from a picture of him to a graphic painting of someone getting their legs torn apart by animals, perhaps he was trying to make a point. Maybe he was finally free to do what made him happy, but he wasn’t exactly ready for the pushback when people wanted him to break out the soaring harmonies and acoustic guitars again.

‘Angel Clare’ – Art Garfunkel

The entire lead-up to Simon and Garfunkel’s break-up was never going to be amicable. Paul Simon had spent months waiting around so that he could get anything decent out of Art Garfunkel before Bridge Over Troubled Water, so while they regrouped in their solo years, Garfunkel could have easily had his time to shine. But without the harmony vocals and the expert songwriting from Simon, a lot of people had to come to a stark realisation right out of the gate: Garfunkel without Simon is a little bit boring.

Does it have some good songs? Sort of. ‘All I Know’ is one of the few highlights from the project, but outside of a few more syrupy ballads, the theory that Simon had about his partner wanting to focus more on movies holds a lot more water. It’s easy to be kind to this album in retrospect, but considering Simon was right on his tail putting out his own solo album really made Garfunkel look like plain Wonderbread by comparison.

As much as he tried, there was no way he had a song like ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ or ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’ in him to turn the tide in his favour. That voice is still immaculate, and he has managed to keep things up over the years, but compared to what Simon was doing, there was no reason to think that Garfunkel was going to have his Graceland put up all-star numbers.

‘Standing in the Spotlight’ – Dee Dee Ramone

Part of the appeal of the Ramones was about them dismantling everything that a rock and roll band was supposed to be. They didn’t give a shit about what the public wanted, and by playing faster and harder than anyone else, every single one of their albums felt like an assault on the senses once they started playing. Dee Dee Ramone did have that fire in him that everyone else did, but when he figured his next calling was to become one of the biggest names in hip-hop.

Then again, Mr Ramone, or Dee Dee King, did at least have a few bits of credibility under his belt. After all, both punk and hip-hop originate from the streets, but when he tried to spit hot fire over a beat, Dee Dee couldn’t help but come off as the kind of drunk uncle that tries to teach the young kids what real music sounds like. You can tell the passion is there, but there’s none of the follow-through that this kind of music needs to thrive.

While Dee Dee himself reasoned that he couldn’t be a rap star because he wasn’t black, that argument doesn’t really hold that much water in the age where Eminem and Logic can become stars. Kudos to him for at least trying to beat the odds, but no one could really blame him when his career started sinking like a stone later on.

‘Love is for Losers’ – The Longshot

Billie Joe Armstrong has said time and time again that Green Day is practically a band of brothers. There’s no reason to think that they are ever going to break up, and even when they do have solo joints, it’s not out of the question for every one of them to work together on something like The Network or Foxboto Hottubs. Because when Armstrong does strike out on his own, not everything goes off as well with Mike Dirnt’s basslines of Tre Cool’s drums pounding away behind him.

While The Longshot was meant to be a journey through rock and roll’s past in many respects, Love is For Losers feels like Armstrong finding an excuse to make the closest thing to dad rock that he can. Outside of a token Ozzy Osbourne cover, a lot of the album feels like it was meant for middle-aged punks that are too old to join a circle pit but aren’t exactly ready to give it up, and while it did work occasionally in the film Ordinary World, a lot of it feels too half-hearted to take seriously.

Even when Armstrong was deliberately limiting himself when making his Covid album No Fun Mondays, he still at least seemed to have some more passion there than working his way through a few power chord ditties here. There’s nothing on the album that’s objectively terrible or anything, but had there been a lost entry in the band’s lacklustre trilogy, this is probably what it would have sounded like.

‘Peter Criss’ – Peter Criss

By the time that Kiss started embracing disco, most hardened rock and roll fans started to realise that the end was near. The rock and roll superheroes that they had idolised as kids had suddenly traded in their leather gear for sequins, and no matter how catchy ‘I Was Made For Lovin’ You’ was, it worked better as a Donna Summer track than a hard rocker. But if you’re looking at the first true crater from their career, it was when they allowed every member of the band to do solo records.

While each of them managed to rise to the occasion, Peter Criss’s solo joint is still one of the most embarrassing moments that the New York legends were ever associated with. Despite having that Rod Stewart rasp in his voice, Criss’s attempt at soul music falls incredibly flat half the time, usually sounding like a cross between a forgotten Motown artist and the kind of lounge singer that would have been laughed out of the room had he not looked like a giant cat while he was singing.

Even years after the fact, the record was still getting made fun of, with the late Andy Wood making jokes during Mother Love Bone shows by threatening to play the album in its entirety if the audience didn’t applaud. It might work for a few cheap laughs, but someone needed to remind Criss that he always worked best when he had a half-decent melody behind him.

‘Two the Hard Way’ – Gregg Allman and Cher

There doesn’t seem to be any career shakeup that Cher can’t endure. Whether that was separating from Sonny Bono, going through her Auto-tune era or becoming one of the stars in a Mamma Mia sequel, she’s more than ready to roll with the punches and do whatever she can to keep her fans satisfied. But her star power comes from having a certain amount of glamour, and that wasn’t really what Gregg Allman was built for.

But that didn’t stop Allman and Cher from trying on Two the Hard Way. Despite having all the right producers in the room with them, hearing these two lovebirds sing about their lives together tends to be more than a little bit awkward. The rock fans were already going to have a severe allergic reaction to this, but just when the album starts getting good during Allman’s Jackson Browne ballad, it’s snuffed out when Cher one-ups him with a cover of Smokey Robinson’s ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’.

And considering Allman has washed his hands of the record in recent years and didn’t think that his wife was all that good a singer to begin with, he seems to have at least learned his lesson. Because while Cher is bulletproof against any kind of career-killing album, it’s like oil and water trying to get her husband involved on a record.

‘Sentimental Journey’ – Ringo Starr

By the time The Beatles announced their breakup, it was only a matter of time before solo album talk started happening. There were already strange experiments made by John Lennon and George Harrison, but now that they were free to work on whatever they wanted, everyone was curious about what the Fab Four could sound like when left to their own devices. One band member had to rip the bandage off first, and while Paul McCartney officially announced it, Ringo Starr was the first one to release an outright dog.

Because out of all the directions that Starr could have taken, easy listening was not the way to go. This might have been made as a way to work around Starr’s lack of songwriting chops, but for a genre that’s focused on bringing in fantastic singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Starr isn’t anywhere near that level of proficiency, to the point where the music seems to be drowning him out most of the time.

He would fare much better when he got some help from his friends and when making country albums like Beaucoup of Blues, but it’s no surprise that Lennon was embarrassed on his bandmates’ behalf. The sky was the limit when the band were together, but Starr’s vain attempt to channel his inner crooner wasn’t going to work any better than when he decided to go disco in the 1970s.

‘We’re All Somebody from Somewhere’ – Steven Tyler

There’s no reason to think that Aerosmith could ever continue on without Steven Tyler. The whole process of the band revolves around that tension between him and Joe Perry, and while the guitarist brings a lot of the grit to their best songs, ‘The Demon of Screamin’ can always match him when playing some of the heaviest rock riffs of all time. But something changed after they tasted success, and ever since the 2000s, Tyler seemed to be chasing something completely different from the rest of his bandmates.

While fans were already raising eyebrows when Tyler decided to become a judge on American Idol, there was no one asking for him to make a homespun country album in his downtime. We had already dealt with him trying to become a boy-band star in the 2000s, but now with the “bro country” movement in full swing, hearing him try to sub out Perry’s guitar for a banjo didn’t help his case. He may have been going for the Janis Joplin approach to country music, but there was no reason to think he would give Tim McGraw a run for his money.

This kind of thing would have been considered pedestrian for any other rock and roll singer, but the fact that he ditched both his band and his TV show to make this move puts it a cut above anything else on this list. That is truly an inhuman level of dedication to an absolutely ridiculous idea, but when you have the kind of legacy that Tyler has, the sky truly is the limit for how deep a hole you can dig for yourself. Aerosmith had already considered looking for other vocalists to fill in for Tyler, but if this was the kind of music he planned on putting out, they were probably doing right by keeping as far away as possible.