In December 2014, D’Angelo released his third studio album, Black Messiah. It was a timeless reflection on love and survival within the maelstrom of American racism that nevertheless inspired one mostly prosaic, and slightly demanding, question from critics and fans: What took him so long?
Journalist Tavis Smiley basically asked D’Angelo as much in a rare interview nine months later. “I’m always writing and learning. It’s about growth,” the reclusive legend said of what he did in the 14 years since his previous release, Voodoo. “That’s what a true artist’s supposed to be doing. Constantly growing and finding new territories.” He then went on to mention Prince and Miles Davis as exemplars of such artistry.
In his answer, D’Angelo didn’t get into the specifics of the gap—namely his personal struggles and tussles with his label. But in it, he touched on a tension underlying the expectations listeners and consumers have for their favorite artists. While D’Angelo is as much a “true artist” as Davis or Prince, his approach to releasing music could not be more different. Prince released 39 studio albums over the course of his 38-year solo career, in addition to a considerable slew of singles, live albums, collaborations, and other projects. Davis was just as, if not more, prolific. And neither the triumphs of Davis’ 1959 classic Kind of Blue, released just a year after his album Milestones, or Prince’s Purple Rain, which took him less than a year to record, were diminished by their relatively short gestation periods.
Still, in 2014, knowing how long we were deprived of new D’Angelo music, my first listen to Black Messiah was that much more urgent and serious. I rushed to hear it, as if it could disappear at any moment. And when it proved to be worth the wait, it confirmed the idea that good things take time.
Most of us have convinced ourselves that the more time we have, the better we can produce or perform what is important to us. With time, there’s space—to reconsider, to develop, or at least to get a stroke of merciful inspiration. More than wise, taking one’s time is alluring, naturally luxurious, and rebellious to a legion of listeners bound to timers, alarms, and punch clocks in their day-to-day. When I listen to Black Messiah, or any other album with a storied history of resisting unnatural deadlines, I may hear growth and confuse it with time. And yet the entrancing power of that story, of that wait, remains.
The gravity and magic that long-awaited albums hold have always been rooted in the unenchanting historical marketing interests of the record industry. But today, artists are challenging the idea that great albums should take any particular time at all. For many, platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud have changed artists’ motivations for releasing their work.
“More and more, current artists of today are releasing, I don’t even want to say ‘albums,’ I’ll just say ‘content,’” says Carolyn Williams, executive vice president of marketing at major label RCA, talking about the shorter EPs and single tracks that many artists trickle out at a steady rate now. “Instant gratification and how much these artists have to compete with for the consumer’s attention definitely drives the process as to how frequently they put out content.” She adds that streaming and engagement metrics now offer artists and labels new ways to determine the best time to release a project in order to capture a particular audience.
“If you’re a rapper now you want to be on a playlist, and the way to keep being on a playlist is to continue to make music that continues to refresh these playlists,” says Devon Powers, associate professor at Temple University and author of Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism. “One of the things we have to get over is thinking that the album is this sacred document—really the album is a historical moment.”
One artist currently playing with expectations of release timing is Chattanooga, Tennessee rapper Bbymutha, who has, over the past year, racked up a steady stream of independently released albums, EPs, and one-off singles. Her prolificness, she tells me, is not due to industry pressure, but rather matches her pace of writing and recording: “I’m always working on shit, and I just have to push it out. It’s like therapy for me.” Despite releasing five projects in 2018, she says her fans on social media always demand more, noting that the pressure to release music seems to fall heaviest on hip-hop artists. “I don’t hear no country people being like, ‘Yo, Dolly Parton, when the fuck you dropping your next tape?’”
On the other hand, independent musician Karin Dreijer has gained a reputation for releasing music unhurriedly across their 20-year career. The Swedish artist’s music, both as Fever Ray and with their brother Olaf in the group the Knife, has come out on the siblings’ own Rabid Records as well as the British label Mute, with unpredictable gaps between. On an independent label, Dreijer says they have never felt pressure to put out music at any particular moment.
“Every time I’m about to release an album, everybody always says, ‘Oh it’s so long since you did this.’ But I don’t see time like that,” Dreijer says. “I am writing, producing, recording. It takes time.” Dreijer also attributes the years between their albums to the fullness of life, raising two kids, and maintaining close relationships with their loved ones. “I’ve seen so many artists who lack of all that, who work all the time and then go on tour and are away for years,” Dreijer says. “I knew really early I don’t want that kind of life. It’s important to be part of society.”
Humming beneath every announcement of an artist’s new project is the nebulous market timetable within which their creative process must fit. Artists that sidestep those limitations keep the dream of impulse and spontaneity alive. Over the past several decades, expectations related to how often artists should release new music have changed, affecting how they develop from fad throwaways to cultural institutions. “No one wants to be that person who had a really great six-month run,” says pop critic and University of Alabama associate professor Eric Weisbard. “But the question of how you get there is what makes pop music so interesting.”
Weisbard points to Frank Sinatra, with his trajectory from teen sensation to musical icon, as the archetype for all of the blockbuster pop stars that have followed. “Everyone, in a sense, wants to be Sinatra,” he says. When the singer first started out in the late 1930s and ’40s, artists who recorded albums were making statements about their longevity, and by extension, their cultural importance. Though he began his solo career in 1942 and quickly became a star, Sinatra didn’t release his first studio album, then a novel idea for a pop musician, until 1946. The Voice of Frank Sinatra, originally sold in a set of four, one-song-per-side 78 rpm records, lent him a new measure of authenticity. “The album simply exploded onto the American consciousness,” writes biographer James Kaplan, “fixing Sinatra’s reputation as not merely a crooner but a singer.”
Two years later, Columbia Records introduced 33⅓ longplay records, or LPs. Becoming the go-to format for adult-oriented genres like classical and jazz, they took on an association with more cultural permanence and higher taste; 45 rpm singles, introduced by RCA in 1949, featured shorter play times and lower retail prices, appealing to pop and rock acts with younger fanbases. “Over time, the LP was positioned as a kind of anti-novelty, even at times anti-modern and anti-mass, commodity,” writes media studies scholar Keir Keightly in an academic essay from 2004.
With their market-driven appeals to greater artistic permanence than here-now-gone-soon singles, LPs became a stabilizing force for record labels trying to remain profitable in the historically volatile industry. It didn’t take long for labels to start having all of their acts record albums—and lots of them. Twelve years after their introduction, LPs made up 80 percent of total record sales. In his 2004 book Breaking Records: 100 Years of Hits, music critic and historian William Ruhlmann notes that the rise of the album shifted artist release schedules from a new single every few weeks in the ’40s to two albums and a handful of singles per year in the ’50s and into the ’60s.
As teen-oriented pop and rock acts started to mature artistically and amass more gravitas, their new status was reflected in relatively longer gaps between releases. Thanks to a 1962 record deal intended to milk the Beach Boys for quick profit, the supposed fad band put out three studio albums per year on Capitol from 1963 to 1965. That pace slowed, however, with the 1966 release of Pet Sounds, which Brian Wilson famously wrote after quitting touring the year earlier, in an effort to break free of the band’s relentless performance and recording schedule. Despite lower sales than their previous albums, the highly orchestrated Pet Sounds distinguished Wilson and the group as musicians with a specific creative vision.
The Beatles followed a similar trajectory from an underestimated teen act to vanguards, releasing their first three studio albums over the course of a year and a half. In the U.S., Capitol milked the band’s UK content for all it was worth, clipping and repackaging those carefully-sequenced releases into five more ever-marketable (and redundant) patchwork albums the band detested. But it was only after 1967’s opus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which also followed the band’s retirement from touring, that the Beatles solidified their place as critically-acclaimed legends. United with the loose theme of the foursome as a psychedelic military band, Sgt. Pepper’s emulated the continuity and grandiosity of the LP’s original, adult-oriented (and thus more “serious”) genres. Playing as one continuous song per side, it also marked the first time a U.S. Beatles album had the same track listing as its UK counterpart. “What you see for most of the next 50 years is this idea that albums are supposed to be conceptual,” says Powers. “They’re supposed to be artistic masterpieces—this achievement that takes a lot of investment.”
Entering the ’70s, those investments started to get larger. The standard rate of production for new artists dropped to one album per year, while superstars pushed for an even slower-paced schedule. Though some established acts, like Elton John and Tony Bennett, still found themselves bound to multi-album-a-year deals, the “long-awaited album” generally distinguished the artists who made them as irreplaceable assets.
In the most public flex of artist sovereignty at the time, Stevie Wonder’s 1975 record deal with Motown granted him unprecedented creative control over his projects, as well as a then-unheard-of $13 million advance. Part of that control included taking as long with his next album as he wanted. After several delays—which Wonder poked fun at with custom-made “We’re almost finished!” T-shirts—the singer released his expansive 18th studio LP, Songs in the Key of Life, in 1976. The length of a feature film, with a genre-spanning tracklist including everything from love to protest songs, the double album ended the then-longest album drought of Wonder’s career: two years. As Zeth Lundy writes in his book on the album, Wonder’s “symbolic contractual standoff that would usher him into the groundbreaking work of his early adulthood” was predicated on the singer’s success as a prolific teen star. Songs debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart and further solidified the singer’s status as a bona fide artist.
Entering the ’80s, amid an industry-wide sales slump, major labels were more willing to invest in blockbuster releases by proven stars than to gamble on new artists. In turn, the frequency of releases continued to slacken. “By the 1980s, you have labels that are uncomfortable with that [’60s] kind of rapid-release schedule,” says David Suisman, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware and author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. “Especially when they are artists that they intend to get a lot of singles out of.”
Whereas Frank Sinatra released 46 studio albums in the 30 years after his 1946 debut, ’70s and ’80s rock giant Bruce Springsteen released just 12 in the three decades after his first album came out in 1973. Michael Jackson, meanwhile, reached the peak of his career building on the anticipation and promotional machine that spaced-out releases made room for. While performing with the Jackson 5 on Motown in the ’70s, the group released one to three albums per year, and Jackson kept a similar pace for his first four solo albums on the label. After the family signed to Epic Records in 1975, however, Jackson put out his solo albums at a relative trickle, releasing Off the Wall in 1979, Thriller three years after that, and then Bad five years later. “For these mammoth artists, the attention was not just on the music,” says Powers of the era. “It was in cross promotion with merchandise, endorsements, music videos, and all of this new potential for creating this branded universe around musicians.”
In the process, the world tour also became a superstar signifier, adding to the time artists had to spend away from the studio. “The live show became much more elaborate because the music-video aesthetic emphasizes this visual accompaniment,” says Weisbard. “There was a sense in which to be part of the album in that ’80s and ’90s iteration—with more expensive concert ticket prices, and compact discs being more expensive than LPs had been—was to be buying a more elite product.” With the stakes and the budgets higher than ever toward the end of the 20th century, it’s no wonder that the seams between artist creation and record company control began to strain in ever more public ways.
Prince’s ’90s clash with Warner Bros. is one example of artistic freedom bruising against industry mandates. The star wanted to release music as he recorded it; the label wanted to cap his albums at one per year to avoid market oversaturation. Unlike the teen idols turned groundbreaking artists of the previous generation, Prince was the rare major label musician fighting for the right to release music more frequently.
At the same time, a single-album-tour two-year cycle crystallized for a new generation of pop artists coming of age during the industry’s CD boom. As the shiny discs flew off shelves with sticker prices nearly double that of LPs, nicely padding major labels’ profit margins, teen acts churned out songs and albums at a slower rate than their ’60s counterparts (and often with fewer royalties) but faster than the era’s most established acts. Britney Spears, for one, released three studio albums and starred in a feature film in the four years following her 1999 hit debut, ...Baby One More Time, capping the run off with her first greatest hits album in 2004.
Similar to how the LP and 45 represented an audience stratified across high and low culture in the ’50s, at the turn of the century, artists creating on a treadmill were seen to offer a less profound body of work than those who took their time. Musicians like Fiona Apple and D’Angelo amassed album sales high enough, critical response positive enough, and fanbases loyal enough to wait years for their next potentially earth-shattering albums.
In hip-hop, major artists showed their artistic prowess via back-to-back releases, challenging industry-dictated illusions of how upstarts grow into legends. JAY-Z was a proven heavy hitter by the time he released The Black Album, his eighth studio album in eight years. Lil Wayne, meanwhile, released 12 solo albums between 1999 and 2018, along with over a dozen mixtapes. Both artists used rapid releases to grow and hone their artistic visions while sharing that growth with the public, harkening back to the creative rigor of the early days of albums without the deflating corporate duress.
Today, the pressure on major artists to produce record after record has dialed down somewhat, even with increased pressure to maintain relevance through social media, TV appearances, and brand deals. Yet the power of long-awaited—and now surprise—albums to signal a musician’s high-level artistry remains.
Whereas Beyoncé was famous long before her 2013 self-titled album, the out-of-nowhere release of Beyoncé proclaimed her stardom to be so big that even record industry convention couldn’t contain it. Four years after his monumental debut, Frank Ocean pulled a similar industry-defying trick with his back-to-back 2016 releases, Endless and Blond. He reportedly released the former to fulfill a contractual obligation to his label, Def Jam, and then put out the latter one day later on his own imprint, effectively retaining sole ownership over the most successful—and marketable—of the two.
Similarly, with this year’s thank u, next, Ariana Grande asserted control over her creative labor by forcing the marketing machine to play catch-up. She described the album, which came only six months after the career-topping Sweetener, as the fulfillment of her dream process: recording and releasing music whenever the mood strikes her. In emulating the rapid releases of hip-hop artists, Grande said, she could bypass the artistic distance inherent in a marketing schedule. Stretching timetables is no longer enough for an artist to trumpet their creative freedom and sophistication. They must now eschew, or at least obscure, such unnatural restrictions completely.
Despite all of the industry changes over the years, long-awaited albums still carry mythic status, inspiring curiosity and excitement in an otherwise constantly-occupied audience. “I am happy when, on an album, you can hear that there is something new that the artist has learned or that they have been trying to find out, something they haven’t done before,” says Fever Ray’s Dreijer. Industry timetables and consumer desires are always in flux, but there will always be artists who continue to challenge perceptions that good music should come on any schedule at all.
