Lucinda Williams has released a dozen albums during her 38-year career, four in the first 18 years and eight in the last 20. She stepped up the pace after 1998’s Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (still her best album), releasing a record about once every other year.
My guess is that if 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone had come after a lengthy hiatus, rather than during the relatively productive streak Williams was on at the time, it would have been received with more critical fanfare.
Yesterday’s featured artist, Beck, has never made two albums that sound alike. Today’s has never made two that sound different.
If you played songs from all of Ron Sexsmith’s 14 albums on random (and I’ve done this), you would have a hard time differentiating the tunes on his 1991 debut from those on this year’s The Last Rider, let alone the dozen in between.
It’s crazy how artists quietly put together careers that start to feel like legacies. Take Beck, who still has the impish charm of the nerd-punk who crashed MTV with “I’m a Loser,” yet somehow is entering his 25th year as a recording artist.
This year’s Colors is Beck’s 13th studio album, released three years after the unlikely Album of the Year Grammy winner Morning Phase. Somehow, this is the first traditional pop album he’s recorded. Or at least as traditional as an oddball like Beck can get.
If you had told me in 2010, after the release of ‘Tik Tok,’ that I would one day not only own a Kesha album but really enjoy it, I’d have thought you mad.
That song was like an R-rated version of Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday,’ and Kesha (then Ke$ha) seemed just as packaged and talentless.
What a difference seven years, an eating disorder and alleged sexual harassment and rape by producer Dr. Luke makes.
John Mayer released his seventh album, The Search For Everything, over the course of several months, putting out two 4-song EPs before dropping the full 12-song set. To me, that’s a little like watching 2/3 of a movie before it finally gets a theatrical release. But I’m old-fashioned.
Rollout strategy aside, The Search For Everything is a strong return to the soulful pop of 2006’s Continuum, probably still his best album though he hasn’t released a bad one since.
