Fun Stuff > BAND
The post-break up/divorce albums and how often they suck
PassiveTheory:
Uh... Beck - Sea Change, anyone? Jesus christ.
rynne:
Heck, I can think of one break-up that resulted in two pretty good albums:
Granted, The Menace was ignored at the time for not being Elastica part II, but in hindsight its biggest problem was that it was about 3-4 years too early for the early-00s dance-punk revival.
Brian Majestic:
Marvin Gaye's "Here My Dear".
So Marvin and his wife were getting ready to have a divorce. Marvin's got no money to pay her a settlement, it somehow gets decided that half of the money of his next album will go to her. So what does he do? Go into the studio to cut a turd of an album to spite her. Except...Well, it's Marvin Gaye.
Most of the songs are about his now-ex wife and their dissolving marriage. It gets released, nobody likes it, it tanks.
Gets rediscovered many, many, years later as a classic.
Also the title is on my short list for most spiteful album titles.
Bayley:
--- Quote from: DynamiteKid on 27 Jan 2009, 08:53 ---
--- Quote from: RedLion on 26 Jan 2009, 17:15 ---
--- Quote from: Divide by Zero on 24 Jan 2009, 08:55 ---But then again, we're talking Dylan here. Is it possible for the guy to make a bad album?
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--- End quote ---
Bahahaha. Zero, you need to take a trawl through the 1980s.
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Hahah seeeerious. I've only met one person in my life who arguably was a bigger Dylan fan than I consider myself to be (and that's kind of saying something, because I took an auditorium-size appreciation class on him), but I will be the first one to admit that he has made some absolutely fucking horrendous music. Awful.
In response to the general topic, I often feel that an artist getting married and entering what music writers call "domestic bliss" is when their tunes really start to go downhill, not their divorce. Most artists I really dig and pay attention to seem to have a mid-20s, drug-addled, romantically-turbulent, philosophically-excating faith crisis period which tends to produce what is referred to as the "golden age" of their creativity. Then, like Dylan, like Lennon, like Costello, like Oberst*, like Adams, they all turn 30-35, and if they don't necessarily get married and have kids, they at the very least find something they latch onto and become comfortable and complacent. And I'm happy for them as people, because no one can be an artistic martyr their whole life. But the quality of their music almost invariably suffers.
*He started early. Conor's 26 is everyone else's 33.
Caspian:
--- Quote from: Inlander on 24 Jan 2009, 17:45 ---Mark Olson's Salvation Blues was one of the best albums of 2007. But divorce is like oxygen for country and country-related music, I guess.
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I think it's pretty much dependent on what genre we're talking about.
Divorce + County/Blues/Folk = good album
Divorce + Anything else = bad album
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