What is the longest gap between two albums?
Not everyone can reel off a flurry of studio albums with the same dizzying pace as The Beatles or The Beach Boys.
Many artists just require a slow gestation to arrive at their art. While picking up toward the end of his life, Scott Walker’s 11-year waits between Climate of Hunter, Tilt, and The Drift seemed to imbue each release with a romantic elusiveness, as if the former ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ crooner needed such extended times away to conjure his increasingly dark and challenging masterstrokes. While there’s some truth in such fanciful mythmaking, the fact was that it just took him a long time to compose and record his sophisticated and modernist avant-garde pieces.
Some of the biggest names in music all made their devoted fans wait 30 years or more, from Abba, Chuck Berry, and The Stooges, taking a solid three decades between key studio albums. Yet when examining the artists that boast the longest gap between records, discounting EPs, compilations, or live albums, the musicians collated serve as music’s intriguing footnotes over any major big name.
There’s an exception. In at number four on a technicality is Alice Cooper, with over 51 years between Muscle of Love and this year’s The Revenge of Alice Cooper, as the 22 albums in between were under the Cooper moniker as a solo artist. Behind him is the cult folk duo Fresh Maggots, with 49 years between their eponymous debut and 2020’s Waiting for the Sun.
In third place is Detroit garage legends MC5, 2024’s Heavy Lifting dropped a whopping 53 years after their sophomore High Time. The silver medal’s handed to novelty loon Napoleon XIV, taking 57 years to finally issue 2023’s For God’s Sake, Stop the Feces! after his comedy debut, They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!
Yet, nudging past Napoleon XIV with the same number of years, but ahead by potentially only a matter of months, is a little-known folk singer more notable as a producer.
So, what wins the longest gap between two albums?
Allegedly, the inspiration for a young Bob Dylan to swap his electric guitar for an acoustic, Odetta’s solo debut, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues, was produced by one Dean Gitter. The next year, he cut 1957’s spooky folk record Ghost Ballads, an album devoted to haunted and macabre tales about Anne Boleyn, phantom stagecoaches, and the infamous Flying Dutchman ghost ship. While dropped to little fanfare, its comic gothic cover is notable for a crooked, Second-Empire style mansion designed by The Addams Family cartoonist Charles Addams.
A restless entrepreneur, Gitter would pursue a second career as a property developer, converting a Massachusetts cinema into the Orson Welles Cinema, featuring a young Tommy Lee Jones as the house manager in 1969. After several ventures in teaching meditation in an ashram, resort and hotel projects, and overseeing the world’s largest kaleidoscope in New York state’s The Emerson, Gitter returned to the studio to cut 2014’s Old Folkies Never Die over 57 years since his solo debut, eking out one more record of Carl Sandburg covers with his backing Ute Mountain Gang band, before passing away the following year in 2018.
