Confession time. My favorite album, for a spell, was Linkin Park‘s Hybrid Theory. Yikes, I know. After that, it was John Mayer‘s Room For Squares. Really? Yes. I jammed “No Such Thing” like nobody’s business. Then came the thankfully less embarrassing Incubus‘ Morning View. I’ve still got a soft spot for all three artists (and I still love that last record quite a bit), and they are all mile markers to where I am now as a listener.
I disclose my past to you to A) Illustrate how direly uncool I am and B) Make a point about the way we treat artists. Evolution as listeners is expected, and many of us encourage our friends to expand their horizons and try new (i.e. “better”) things, but rarely do we afford bands the same opportunity. We expect them to be the constants in a chaotic flurry of change happening all around them, demanding they make similar songs in similar albums even as the artists making them grow into themselves both as musicians and people. That debut album you love becomes a stake, and most bands can’t help but feel leashed to it. Then, we are surprised when they seem to quit fighting.
I first came across Title Fight in late 2013, spotting them on the Fun Fun Fun Fest bill the year I was making the journey down to Austin for the three-day blowout. The Kingston, Pennsylvania outfit had been around for about a decade already by that point, but just a year prior they’d put out Floral Green, both their personal breakout and a spark plug for the Emo Renaissance unfolding over the past couple of years. As someone with a certain affinity for Brand New, Taking Back Sunday and the like, I immediately gravitated toward the hooks that spilled out of it, and the album became something I made a habit of revisiting in the months to follow.
Then, a couple of weeks back, I heard “Chlorine.” Designated as the lead single from their new record Hyperview, I was near-paralyzed by it, not only for how much I enjoyed it, but for how massively evolved it was. I don’t know if we are willing to extend the post-(insert genre) label to anything else, but if there’s such a thing as post-emo, this is it, embracing the raw honesty and vital energy of all the music that came before them but freeing themselves of the aesthetic constraints the back catalog had built up. Maturation is something of a cliché in music, too often a substitute for a band gone complacent. But this was actual maturation, a band aging and allowing itself to edit its identity into that which was more reflective of their present, not past. In that same happy moment, I mourned the thought of all the bands out there who didn’t feel the license to do the same, afraid of alienating their old fans and unable to make up the deficient with new ones.
On a micro level, we just saw Oklahoma singer-songwriter John Calvin Abney similarly shake it up. A philosophy major, he’s always been one to wax poetic, but more often than not, his breezy music belied the heady sophistication he’d bring to a conversation. Now comes Better Luck, a refined American rock album that seems entirely more reflective of John in 2015, not the John fans first started to like five years back. Listeners seem to have embraced that change, but I don’t think Graham Colton got the same opportunity when he released Lonely Ones last year. Colton was a different person than the one who wrote polite, ABC Family-friendly folk-pop ballads littered through his old material, so he shifted gears, crafting a indie rock-inflected but still entirely accessible batch of songs. Maybe people just didn’t like it (fair enough), but I can’t help but feel like his old fans didn’t give it the light of day and new ones weren’t willing to come on board, either. It’s no wonder that many who rely on music as a livelihood aren’t willing to break from what’s worked up to then.
I don’t listen to much Linkin Park anymore. Or John Mayer. Or Incubus*. But I’m not necessarily arguing that you have to be a fixed point either, as there’s an appropriate give-and-take. You can be a critical listener. This isn’t death do you part. You and I should be willing to try and take their hand and follow for a bit, but you are more than free to jump ship if you decide you don’t like where an artist is headed. I do think, though, that every album deserves a chance, because different doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Remove your past experiences and try to listen within a vacuum, because the music might start to mean something once excised from the memories of the older stuff. Conversely, maybe you don’t like what a group has done to this point, but why not check out their new song just in case you would now? I promise you are a different listener now than you were five years ago, to the same degree a band might have changed.
I’d love it if we could flip the conversation from being a fan of an artist to a fan of an album. Legacies shouldn’t be tainted because a band decided to allow itself to keep things fresh and exciting for themselves. Artists — the great ones — should never make the same album twice, nor should they feel like they have to.
* Incubus put out a new song on Thursday. I like it quite a bit.
