Chris Trottier on Nostr: Let's talk about famous musicians who did their best work when they stopped being ...

Let's talk about famous musicians who did their best work when they stopped being famous.

Yesterday, I stumbled across two albums that really opened my mind to this phenomenon. It happens more often than people realize. Sometimes artists just grab their money bag and then afterwards make what they *really* want.

The first example is Art of Noise. These guys had a hit with their debut album "Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?". They had further critical acclaim with their next three albums "In Visible Silence", "In No Sense? Nonsense!" and "Below the Waste".

Then in 1999, when they were barely in the mainstream, they released "The Seduction of Claude Debussy". This is Debussy's music blended with with drum and bass, opera, hip hop, jazz, and narration. It's okay, but because of commercial considerations, it was not as good as it *could* have been.

And we know this to be the case because in 2022, what the album *should* have been was released as "Balance – Music For The Eye".

The original, unedited "producer's cut" sessions recorded by original band members Anne Dudley, Trevor Horn, Paul Morley, and Lol Creme. Unlike "The Seduction of Claude Debussy" which uses a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, "Balance – Music For The Eye" is a continuous, 26-track ambient, classical-electronic suite divided into three distinct parts. There are no vocalists. Apart from narration to introduce each part, it is purely instrumental, relying on sampling, orchestral textures, and moody synthesizer soundscapes.

"Balance – Music For The Eye" has never been released in a physical format. If you want it physically, you either have to download the lossless files and burn it to disc yourself or record it to cassette tape.

Hardly anyone knows about this album. It is extremely obscure. And yet it is absolutely their best album, their clear magnum opus.

Another example is Terence Trent D'Arby. Or as he's known nowadays, Sananda Maitreya.

In the 80s, D'Arby seems like the heir apparent to Prince. His debut album "Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby" was HUGE. It sold 8 million copies worldwide. And it was a great showcase of soul, funk, and rock blended together.

Terence's problem is that he was just too weird for the mainstream. Yes, if you can believe it, even weirder than Prince. Many people were turned off by his big ego, which alienated many fans as well as the industry. But he continued to have commercial success and critical acclaim into the 90s, especially in the UK.

That is, until 2001 when he changed his name to Sananda Maitreya and declared "Terence Trent D'Arby was dead ... he watched his suffering as he died a noble death. After intense pain I meditated for a new spirit, a new will, a new identity."

Now Prince did the same thing but at least he also referred to himself "The Artist Former Known as Prince" and then changed his name back. Sananda never did.

Instead, he moved to Italy, decided to finally make whatever he wanted, and released these wildly ambitious double albums. He started putting more and more elements that departed from his initial soul, going deeper and deeper into prog territory.

And then in 2015, he had what I like to call his "Sun Ra moment" when he released "The Rise of the Zugebrian Time Lords" which is a sprawling 2CD space opera centring on time-traveling antagonist entities and existential battles. It is a riveting listen.

Was he finished? No, he decided to go more epic with the 2017 release "Prometheus & Pandora". This is a monumental 3-volume, 53-track concept album exploring Greek mythology, archetypes, and human suffering.

But believe it or not, *that* album was not the completion of the concept because he continued it with the 2021 release, "Pandora's PlayHouse". This is an additional 28 tracks that continues "Prometheus & Pandora". And this blends soul-rock, spoken word interludes, and jazz-inflected instrumentals.

And he was still not done. In 2024, he made the mythos a trilogy with "The Pegasus Project: Pegasus & The Swan". It is 44 tracks. And this time he's adding classical element by including the Archima String Quartet and the Budapest Art Orchestra.

Let me remind you that *all* of this is independently made and far, far away from the major label system. Whether or not you like Terence Trent D'Arby / Sananda Maitreya, you cannot deny that any other artists match this kind of ambition.

Now I can think of other artists for which this occurred to lesser degrees: Scott Walker, Talk Talk, and Gary Numan come to mind. But the thing with those artists is that though their commercial visibility was long behind them, their critical visibility was not. At least music nerds know the story behind those artists.

But in the case of The Art of Noise and Terence Trent D'Arby / Sananda Maitreya, even the critics are unaware of their recently released work that far exceeds their successful mainstream albums.

Do any of you have any other examples of this happening?