Every time an older pop/rock musician comes out with a new album, the reviews are always “this is the best album they’ve made since that album that was actually good several decades ago” (and then two months later, nobody ever listens to the new album ever again).
So I’ve been idly wondering whether there is a pop/rock artist that has ever actually created their best album ever after they’re 33 — I couldn’t think of anybody offhand.
Data science to the rescue!
Now, note that I didn’t say “created a good album” or “wrote some good songs”, because that happens all the time. But their best album?
And, sure, it’s all subjective blah blah blah, but surely nobody reasonable would say that I/O is Peter Gabriel’s best album. Surely! There must be some sanity in the world!
So I picked a couple dozen artists that have had long careers, and plotted their albums in the chart above. The ones that somebody reasonably could call “their best” are marked in green. When it’s a band, I’ve picked the “main songwriter”, but bands are usually more or less the same age, so it doesn’t matter that much.
And… my intuition was basically kinda correct: The vast majority of what can be considered “best albums” are done before the age of 33. But there’s some outliers, like Pet Shop Boys, Kate Bush and Kraftwerk.
[Edit: The chart above isn’t the original — I’ve added a few more “conceivable bests” after protests, but it doesn’t change much on the whole.]
For jazz performers and contemporary composers, I think the productive career is often longer? I don’t really have a theory as to why older pop musicians stop writing banging tracks, but my guess is that they get so good at stitching together reasonably OK-sounding songs that they stop experimenting — and if you don’t experiment, you don’t fail or stumble upon new, cool tunes.
I’ve put the data on Microsoft Github, and I got the data from discogs… which reminds me that I should do some whinging about discogs:
So Eurythmics have done 27 albums? Really? Yes, because they include all effluvia like “BBC Rock Hour #434 (Version “A”)” in the “album” section, so even if they’ve really only done, like, ten albums, you get all this junk.
I’ve tried to edit out the junk, so I may have missed some, or edited too much, but it doesn’t really make that much difference to my extremely scientific approach here.
Did you know that The Beatles released 174 albums? Not many people do.
(And also: Nyah, nyah, Betteridge’s law.)