Albums don’t happen overnight. But for the 14 Rock Stars Who Haven’t Released an Album in 10 Years, it’s been a pretty long time since their last release.
The reasonings stretch far and wide. For some, tension among band members makes working in close studio quarters awkward; for others, touring has proven a more fruitful endeavor than making new music. And others have found the industry has simply changed too far beyond recognition.
“Radio is so fuckin’ formatted, if you don’t have a banjo and a beard, they’re not playing you over here,” Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx said at a 2014 press conference. His band’s last album arrived in 2008. “If you’re this kind of band at this stage of your career, you can’t be played on Active Rock; if you’ve been around for more than 15 years, you’re classic rock, but classic rock radio doesn’t play new music. You just think, ‘Fuck, man, this sucks.’
Some artists have reached the point in their careers where they can’t keep up with the demands of making a new album.
“I’m not crazy about going into a recording studio and doing that kind of life again or taking on another project where there’s other people involved — arrangers and orchestrators and conductors and producers,” Billy Joel told ABC News in 2014, noting that he has no plans to make another album. (His last was in 2001.) “I don’t want to deal with it. … You have to have a certain amount of ambition to want to do all that.”
Whatever the reason, the 14 Rock Stars Who Haven’t Released an Album in 10 Years below probably won’t be changing their minds about it anytime soon.