Vol. 24: Why Is the First Album So Hard to Beat?

There’s an old saying in the music business that you have your entire life to write your first album and about eighteen months to write your second.

I have no idea who said it first. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

An artist can spend their entire lifetime leading up to “making it” — writing songs, perfecting their craft and, maybe most importantly, simply living.

Throughout that lengthy period, they’ve probably made a bunch of music that they themselves would admit wasn’t very good. Songs get written and discarded. Bands play tiny clubs to almost nobody. Demos get made. Styles change. Relationships end. People move away. People die. Jobs suck. Hearts get broken.

And nobody is waiting for the next album.

There’s a freedom in that.

By the time an artist finally gets discovered, they may have stockpiled the greatest songs they have ever written. They’ve lived a career’s worth of life and have all of that raw material sitting there, ready to share with the world.

Then the first album comes out.

And if it succeeds, everything changes.

Suddenly there is somebody waiting for the next album.

A record company. A manager. Radio. Critics. And, most intimidating of all, fans who fell in love with the first one.

Now go do it again.

Only better.

Welcome to the sophomore jinx.

The Impossible Second Album

The second album presents a problem that didn’t exist the first time around.

Not only does the artist have considerably less time to make it, but the life that created album number one may no longer exist.

Being broke becomes touring.

Playing empty clubs becomes playing sold-out theatres.

Sitting around with your friends wondering if anyone will ever hear your music becomes sitting in a hotel room answering questions about the music everybody has now heard.

And then there are expectations.

If people loved the first album, the safest decision would seem obvious:

Give them more of what they loved.

Make First Album Part 2.

I actually think that can be a trap.

Because if you make essentially the same album twice, the second one will inevitably be compared to the first. And I think it’s incredibly difficult to make the same thing twice and have the second version feel better than the original.

Which is why I personally love a sophomore album that completely switches gears.

You already proved you can make that album.

Why not use album number two to show us something we didn’t know you could do?

Maybe the best way to avoid the sophomore jinx is not to try to beat your first album at its own game.

Change the game.

Nobody demonstrated that better than the Beastie Boys.

Beastie Boys — Paul’s Boutique (1989)

The Beastie Boys could have made this very easy on themselves.

Licensed to Ill was enormous. So make another one.

More big drums. More loud guitars. More bratty rhymes. More party anthems. Give the millions of kids who bought Licensed to Ill exactly what they wanted.

I was one of those kids.

I actually wrote about this in the very first Dad’s Music Muse. I was 14 when Paul’s Boutique came out, and such a huge Beastie Boys fan that I convinced my mom to drive me to Sam the Record Man before it opened so I could buy the cassette on release day.

You can read that original Dad’s Music Muse Prelude here.

I couldn’t wait to hear the follow-up to Licensed to Ill.

Then I pressed play.

And heard “To All the Girls.”

I genuinely thought something was wrong with the cassette.

This wasn’t Licensed to Ill Part 2. It barely sounded like the same group.

Which, of course, was the point.

After splitting with Def Jam and Rick Rubin and relocating to Los Angeles, the Beasties connected with the Dust Brothers and created a densely layered collage of samples pulled from seemingly everywhere.

The result was radically different from the stripped-down rap-rock sound that had made them stars.

Commercially, Paul’s Boutique didn’t come close to matching its predecessor at the time. But history has been much kinder to it. The album’s sample-heavy production came to be regarded as groundbreaking, and its reputation grew dramatically in the years after its release.

For most of my life, it has been my favourite Beastie Boys album.

And I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they had taken the easier path.

Would Licensed to Ill still be considered a classic today? Absolutely.

But would we look back at Licensed to Ill Part 2 the same way we look back at Paul’s Boutique?

I really don’t think we would.

They didn’t try to recreate the band we’d already met.

They reintroduced themselves.

Tears for Fears — Songs from the Big Chair (1985)

Not every successful second album needs to burn the first one to the ground.

Sometimes you can simply make the room bigger.

Tears for Fears had already succeeded with their 1983 debut, The Hurting. It was dark, introspective and heavily influenced by psychologist Arthur Janov’s ideas about childhood trauma and primal therapy.

It also produced UK hits including “Mad World,” “Change” and “Pale Shelter.”

Then came Songs from the Big Chair.

“Shout.”

“Head Over Heels.”

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

Rather than abandoning the ideas behind The Hurting, Tears for Fears expanded them.

The sound became bigger and more accessible without suddenly becoming lightweight. Where much of the debut looked inward, Songs from the Big Chair began looking outward.

It’s a different solution to the same problem the Beastie Boys faced.

Don’t repeat the debut.

Expand it.

The result turned Tears for Fears from a successful British band into international stars.

Whitney Houston — Whitney (1987)

Then there’s the other approach.

Sometimes First Album Part 2 works just fine.

Especially when you’re Whitney Houston.

Her 1985 self-titled debut wasn’t exactly an album crying out for improvement. It had already established her as one of the biggest new voices in music.

So when it came time for album number two, nobody needed Whitney Houston to suddenly discover punk rock.

Instead, Whitney took everything that worked the first time and made it even bigger.

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me).”

“Didn’t We Almost Have It All.”

“So Emotional.”

“Where Do Broken Hearts Go.”

All four reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The album itself debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 — making Houston the first female artist ever to enter that chart at the top — and remained there for 11 consecutive weeks.

That’s not avoiding the sophomore jinx.

That’s running it over with a truck.

And Whitney complicates my theory a little.

Maybe you can make the same basic thing twice and make the second one every bit as successful.

You just need to be Whitney Houston.

Simon & Garfunkel — Sounds of Silence (1966)

Simon & Garfunkel had a very different problem.

Before worrying about how to follow a successful debut, you first need to have a successful debut.

They didn’t.

Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was released in 1964 and sold only about 2,000 copies.

Discouraged, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel went their separate ways. Simon headed to England. Garfunkel returned to college.

That could easily have been the end of the story.

Except one of the songs on that album refused to die.

“The Sound of Silence” had originally been recorded acoustically. Producer Tom Wilson later added electric instrumentation to the existing recording, and the new version began climbing the charts.

Suddenly there was demand for Simon & Garfunkel again.

And suddenly there needed to be another album.

Sounds of Silence arrived in 1966, containing the newly electrified title track alongside songs including “I Am a Rock,” “Kathy’s Song” and “Richard Cory.”

There’s something I love about this example because it turns our whole premise upside down.

The sophomore jinx is supposed to be the pressure of following success.

Simon & Garfunkel made their second album because the first one had failed so badly that they’d already broken up.

Maybe sometimes having nothing left to lose is its own kind of freedom.

Oasis — (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

I should probably disclose something before going any further.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am not the guy you call when you want to spend an evening celebrating Oasis.

I’ve just never been their biggest fan, outside of a handful of songs that I think are great.

But even I have to admit this is one hell of a sophomore act.

Definitely Maybe had already been an enormous debut, going straight to number one in the UK and establishing Oasis as one of the defining new British bands of the era.

A little over a year later they released (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

“Wonderwall.”

“Don’t Look Back in Anger.”

“Some Might Say.”

“Champagne Supernova.”

Unlike the Beastie Boys, Oasis didn’t throw away the blueprint. They refined it.

The arrangements got bigger, the choruses got bigger and Noel Gallagher leaned further into ballads and anthems without fundamentally changing what Oasis was.

And there’s an interesting tidbit that sort of puts a dent in the premise of this entire article.

Noel Gallagher had reportedly already written much of the material for the second album while Definitely Maybe was being released.

In other words, Oasis may have partially avoided the sophomore problem because they hadn’t yet run out of the stockpile.

Maybe they still had some of that lifetime’s worth of songs sitting around.

I may not be the world’s biggest Oasis fan.

But I’ll give them that one.

The Pharcyde — Labcabincalifornia (1995)

This is the one that gets personal for me.

The period between 1992 and 1995 was pretty formative in my life.

A lot of growing up happened. A lot of self-doubt. A lot of questioning how the world worked.

By 1995, I was 20 years old — right around that age when questions start creeping in.

What do I want to do with my life?

What SHOULD I be doing with my life?

You go from being a punk teenager to supposedly being a grown adult remarkably quickly.

At least that’s how it felt to me.

In 1992, The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde took my friends and me by storm.

They were wacky. They almost seemed like cartoon characters. When they breakdanced, they looked like rubber action figures.

They rapped about lighthearted topics and somehow managed to weave humour into hip-hop without turning themselves into a novelty act.

They seemed like four guys celebrating hip-hop culture and having an absolute blast doing it.

Then life happened.

Between Bizarre Ride and Labcabincalifornia, The Pharcyde toured, their profile grew, their relationship with producer J-Swift deteriorated, and tensions within the group intensified.

J-Swift, whose production had helped shape the personality of Bizarre Ride, was no longer behind the boards for album number two.

The group also connected with a then-little-known Detroit producer named Jay Dee.

We know him better today as J Dilla.

His production, alongside tracks produced by members of The Pharcyde and others, helped give Labcabincalifornia a very different atmosphere from its predecessor.

The silliness hadn’t completely disappeared, but the album was more subdued, cynical and introspective.

In other words, life happened.

They grew up.

And so had I.

That’s why I’ve always preferred Labcabincalifornia.

I realize I may be in the minority. Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde is widely regarded as the classic. And I understand why.

But Labcabincalifornia met me at exactly the right point in my life.

The group that sounded perfect to me at 17 had changed by the time I was 20.

Fortunately, so had I.

Sometimes an artist grows up between albums.

Sometimes the listener does too.

And every once in a while, they manage to do it together.

So Is the First Album Really the Best?

After thinking about all six of these albums, I’m not sure the sophomore jinx is really about running out of good songs.

Maybe it’s about change.

The artist who walks into the studio to make album number two is not the same artist who made album number one.

How could they be?

Success changes your life. Failure changes your life. Touring changes your life. Money changes your life. Losing people changes your life. Meeting new people changes your life.

And the audience changes too.

The first time we hear an artist, there’s no history attached. No expectations. We don’t know what they’re supposed to sound like yet.

By album number two, we do.

Maybe that’s why the sophomore album is such a fascinating test.

Do you give people what they already love?

Do you make it bigger?

Do you become more polished?

Or do you do what the Beastie Boys did and make your biggest fans wonder if somebody put the wrong cassette in the case?

There probably isn’t one correct answer.

Whitney Houston doubled down.

Tears for Fears expanded.

Simon & Garfunkel got a second chance they probably never expected.

Oasis still had songs in the chamber.

The Pharcyde grew up.

And the Beastie Boys basically started over.

All six found different ways past the same problem.

So maybe an artist’s greatest advantage on their first album isn’t youth, hunger or even time.

Maybe it’s simply that nobody knows what to expect yet.

And perhaps the artists who make truly great second albums are the ones who figure out that they don’t have to live up to those expectations at all.

Sometimes they just have to give us a new reason to listen.

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