Okay, so Radiohead’s “Kid A” was up for album of the year, and that’s the 2nd album in a row they’ve had up for that honor. (Their last album, “OK Computer,” was up for the same award in 1997.) So I was wondering…what artist has had the most consecutive albums nominated for Album of the Year? I would imagine anything higher than 2 would be rare. Hell, even two is pushing it seeing how sketchy some people’s careers can be. Any insight?
Okay, I really tried to help you out with this one, socialxray, but you asked a mouthful. There might be someone more up to the task, but I’ll tell you what I found.
I wasn’t even about to attempt nominations because at the Grammy Web Page you can search for past winners. You can find out nominees, but there are so many and they aren’t as easily searchable. On the other hand, I was able to just look up all of the past winners for Album of the Year.
Anyway, from what I could see, Stevie Wonder is pretty high up there for winning Album of the Year multiple times in a year. He won two years in a row, 1973 & 1974, and then again in 1976. So, if Stevie Wonder took a year off between albums, that would be three in a row.
Besides the problems with looking up nominees, this led me to two problems. First off, you would have to be very well versed in all genres of music to know if an artist had consecutive nominations (maybe they took a very long break between albums, and thus a win in 1959 and one in 1965 would be consecutive). I am not that well versed.
The second problem is that there are several wins included artists from different bands; Paul Simon won with Simon & Garfunkle and solo, so would this be considered consecutive? That’s not quite the what I meant, but there are albums that won that are compilations of different artists. So you see the problem I had.
So, as far as winners go, the most consecutive winner looks to be Stevie Wonder, though Paul Simon and Frank Sinatra are other possibilities (I’m not familiar enough with any of their albums to be sure).