When Bad Albums Happen to Good People

by editor Michele Catalano

Three days before my 17th birthday, I was sitting in my friend Maryanne’s car—a huge white cadillac named Floyd— in a 7-11 parking lot, smoking a joint, eating fistfuls of chips, and listening to WNEW-FM, the New York rock station that was about to play Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door” in its entirety for the first time. Life was good. I was about to embark on my senior year at a Catholic high school. Only nine months until I was free of the New York education system. I was already feeling that little flutter of freedom. Senior year was going to be great. Lots of cutting out and playing pranks and annoying nuns, and it would all be soundtracked by this Led Zeppelin album I had been anxiously awaiting for three years. I imagined I would play In Through the Out Door constantly—in my car, at home, on my boombox after school in the bleachers—because Led Zeppelin was that band for me. Even though their previous album, Presence, was mediocre at best, I still loved them and believed in them. Surely they heard the grumblings about their previous album and would kick ass on this new one.

The DJ had stopped talking. We were ready. Here we go, I remember thinking, feeling slightly trepidatious. 

“In the Evening” took the wind out of my sails right away. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t what I expected. It felt safe, ready for radio. Maryanne and I sat there, taking up a parking space, smoking and eating, and looking at each other like “it has got to get better.”

“Southbound Suarez” and “Fool in the Rain” did nothing to dispel my unease. What the fuck is this? Where are the screeching guitars and pounding drums and Robert Plant’s plaintive wails? This felt so tame. I was willing to keep going, though, hoping there would be at least one song to cling to. And then “Hot Dog” came on. And I cried. Literal teenage tears, right there in the 7-11 parking lot while clutching a bag of Andy Capp’s Hot Fries and a Slurpee. Maryanne laughed—not at me, but at the song—and I cried, and together we said “fuck this” and changed the station, not even waiting for side two. I felt betrayed and upset. How dare they change it up on us so drastically?

That wouldn’t be my last experience with bad albums from bands I love. And it certainly wasn’t an experience unique to me. There are thousands of people all over the world right now listening to Taylor Swift’s new album and saying, “What the fuck is this?” And I’m here to tell you, my friends, it gets better. You get over it…eventually. You may even come to enjoy the album 40 years from now, like I did with In Through the Out Door. But for now you are grieving, and that’s okay. You must go through those stages of grief ito get over feeling let down by your favorite star. You know, denial (this is a joke, right?), anger (how dare they), bargaining (I’ll sit through this terrible song because the next song has got to be better), depression (the tears), and, finally, acceptance (I guess this is where we’re at now). Eventually you will forgive the cringey lyrics and mid melodies. Maybe not now, maybe not even next year. But Taylor is your thing, Taylor is your muse, your  obsession, your absolute favorite. And nothing hurts as bad as our favorites letting us down. Put the album away for a bit. Listen to something else. Or,  as I did, you can wallow.

The funny thing is, I’d been through a similar bit of a band setback earlier in the year, when Van Halen released Van Halen II. I cried, I yelled, I laughed my ass off when I first heard “Dance the Night Away.” But while I loved Van Halen, it was not with the fervor with which I loved Zeppelin; so the disappointment and offhand embarrassment weren’t as acute as they would be five months later, when I would listen to In Through the Out Door.

There would be many more album disappointments in my life, instances where I thought a band didn’t live up to their reputation, or changed entirely, as was the case with Incubus.

I came into Incubus early in their career, right after they put out their Fungus Amongus EP. I fell in love with the band when  they branched out on their first full studio album, S.C.I.E.N.C.E. This record was full of sounds I’d never heard before. Record-scratching, funky, groovy, drug-fueled music that immediately made itself at home on my “this is a band of the future” list. I played S.C.I.E.N.C.E. so often that my daughter considers it a soundtrack to her formative years (I wrote about it here). 

While I was waiting for Incubus to release a follow-up, I saw them four times, bought tons of merch, and basically devoted my life to getting people to listen to them. It took two years for Brandon Boyd and company to finally come through. When Make Yourself was announced, I was ecstatic. The buildup was enormous. I’d bring it up every time I was with my sister, who fully understood my Incubus obsession. And then, at last. In late October 1999, Incubus’s second full album was released. I was at the record store at 9 a.m., eager, anxious, and absolutely giddy to be getting my hands on a new Incubus album. 

I didn’t even listen in my car. I wanted to go home and lock myself in my bedroom and put on headphones. I wanted to enjoy this alone, without distractions. I sent my kids across the street to help their grandmother sort out Halloween treats and dug in.

Now, I don’t want to say I hated it upon first listen. Hate is such a strong word. At first, I didn’t feel that raw, ugly emotion that would come later; I only felt confused and displaced, like I had walked into the wrong room on the first day of school. This is Incubus? Are we sure? I started at the CD, looked at the track listing, and read the liner notes. Yeah, this was Incubus. This was my Incubus, makers of heavy songs, of stoner rock married to nu-metal. But how could that be? How could I reconcile what I was hearing on “Stellar” or “Clean” with the weirdness and funkiness of S.C.I.E.N.C.E.? I get that bands sometimes want to experiment with other sounds, but I reserve the right to hate that sound. 

When I finished the album, I let out a deep, exasperated sigh and called my sister to tell her the bad news. She had already heard a few songs. We mourned a little. We got angry, we got sad, and finally we accepted that Incubus was no longer for us. It was a heavy moment. 

It really sucks when a favorite band puts out what you perceive to be a bad album, but I imagine it’s even worse when the majority of critics and music fans share that sentiment. I like Taylor, I like her music. I feel a weird empathy for her that this album is being more or less panned. I don’t worry about the fans, though. They’ll bounce back. They will forgive, they will forget. How do I know this? Because I own a copy of Incubus’ follow-up to Make Yourself, Morning View, which was even worse. I own Van Halen’s follow-up to II, which is not great. We’re resilient, we diehard fans. We take the bad albums as aberrations and hope the next one negates whatever bad feelings we were left with. It doesn’t always work out, but we’re always willing to try.

And I know this because In Through the Out Door and Make Yourself both ended up in my regular rotation. Except “Hot Dog.” I still skip that one.

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