# Where did THAT come from? - Artists who put out one awesome work **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 15, 2013, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317 "2013-01-15T19:19:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![It\_s\_Not\_Rocket\_Surgery](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/it_s_not_rocket_surgery/32/312_2.png) [@It\_s\_Not\_Rocket\_Surgery](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/It_s_Not_Rocket_Surgery)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2013, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/1 "2013-01-15T19:19:46Z")
Sometimes, an artist (I’m mostly thinking of musical artists, but this can happen in any creative field) will put out a work that is SO much better than all their other work, you wonder why the muse hit them so perfectly! Some examples: Queensryche was a decent hair metal band. Then they released _Operation:Mindcrime_, which in my opinion is the best metal album of all time. Then they went pop and never approached those heights again. Where did the inspiration for that one album come from? Another, more controversial one - Green Day was a successful pop punk band, who had released a bunch of good if not awesome CDs. Then came _American Idiot_. Blew me away! Their albums since then have been their usual good quality, but nowhere near\* Idiot\*. Note: This really only applies to artists who have a decent amount of output. So while Harper Lee obviously never wrote another novel as good as\* To Kill A Mockingbird\*, you can’t compare it to her other work because there is none. And while _In The Aeroplane Over The Sea_ may be great, there isn’t exactly a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel/Jeff Mangum stuff out there besides it. I’m sure there are other prolific artists that have that one work that blows all their other stuff away - let’s hear about it! ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2013, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/2 "2013-01-15T19:42:52Z")
I haven’t read anything else by Bram Stoker, but the stuff I’ve read \*about \*Bram Stoker says that \*\*\*Dracula \*\*\*is about 50 times better than any of his other books. For me, personally, \*\*_Tarzan is a lot better than anything else I’ve read by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Princess of Mars is a sturdy, competent adventure sci-fi, and Land that Time Forgot_ is bleah, but \*\*\*Tarzan \*\*\*had me near tears at the end. And I like the Beach Boys, but _ **Good Vibrations** _ just boggles my mind. ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/3 "2013-01-16T00:44:49Z")
Love-“Forever Changes”. Their other stuff isn’t bad but this is far better than anything else and is probably my favorite album of all time. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/4 "2013-01-16T01:59:52Z")
George Harrison as a solo artist - _All Things Must Pass_ is easily better than everything else he did solo, put together. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/5 "2013-01-16T02:04:22Z")
David Quammen is a very good writer about the natural world and what we know about its workings. But _The Song of the Dodo_, his book about the history of how we came to know what we know about evolution and extinction, is IMHO one of the best nonfiction books on any subject, by anyone, ever. ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/6 "2013-01-16T02:14:03Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > George Harrison as a solo artist - _All Things Must Pass_ is easily better than everything else he did solo, put together. “Pitying You Wretched Unenlightened Rubes and Yahoos” was pretty good, though. ---
**Author:** ![Quint](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/76d3ee/32.png) [@Quint](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quint)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/7 "2013-01-16T05:38:09Z")
Liz Phair’s **Exile in Guyville** is an amazing album, and nothing else she has done has even come close. In fact, the bland mundanity of her subsequent albums have made people less inclined to accept the incredible sonic awesomeness of **Exile** for what it is. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/8 "2013-01-16T06:00:06Z")
One example that I’m currently stupefied and amazed by is the new album from metal core band **A Life Once Lost** , _Ecstatic Trance_. I picked it up shortly after it’s release last November, but didn’t really start listening to it until mid-December. It’s fucking brilliant. Like, “I can’t stop listening to it” brilliant. I wasn’t familiar with the band at all, so I started doing some research. The band has been around for close to 14 years now, bringing their own brand of Philadelphia metalcore to the world. I bought all their previous albums, to see what I had been missing. And the answer was: not much. Their previous albums are decent metalcore, but nothing brilliant. Kind of a Meshuggah vibe to their sound, but nothing in there that made bells go off and shit. Their new album is nothing like their old material. It’s trance-y metal, like if **Chrome** suddenly got aggressive. The lead guitar work is superlative, the songwriting eschews even metalcore’s loose conventions, and each song is so dense that it takes repeated listening to hear everything going on in each track. Apparently the two guys who started the band fired everyone a few years ago in order to move their sound into new territory. From what I’ve been able to find online, I think the two of them wrote and recorded nearly everything on the album except the drums. It was a huge risk artistically and commercially, but obviously (to me) it was the best thing they could have done for themselves. They may have even come close to forging an entirely new sub-genre of metal, and that alone is noteworthy; the fact that they did it with such an awesome chunk of sonic pie blows me away. I love it when someone steps up their game, even if it’s just for a brief, shining moment. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/9 "2013-01-16T06:00:25Z")
George Orwell had _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ and _Animal Farm_, a few lesser novels (including some interesting semi-autobiographical work like _Down And Out In Paris And London_), and a large number of essays that basically prefigure his two main novels. He certainly has the volume, but his two main works outshine everything else in much the same way the sun outshines all of the other stars. It doesn’t help that much of his other work is so thematically similar to his two big novels. ---
**Author:** ![denquixote](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9bd4f/32.png) [@denquixote](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/denquixote)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/10 "2013-01-16T06:04:33Z")
Joseph Heller - Catch-22 J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner Jack Kerouac - On The Road Dennis Hopper - Easy Rider (as a director) Norm Cash - 1961 baseball season Detroit first baseman Steve Fisher - 1989 NCAA basketball tournament Michigan coach Don Larsen - Game 7 1956 World Series Yankee pitcher The Band - Music From Big Pink Otis Redding - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume One ---
**Author:** ![denquixote](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9bd4f/32.png) [@denquixote](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/denquixote)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/11 "2013-01-16T06:06:49Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > George Orwell had _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ and _Animal Farm_, a few lesser novels (including some interesting semi-autobiographical work like _Down And Out In Paris And London_), and a large number of essays that basically prefigure his two main novels. He certainly has the volume, but his two main works outshine everything else in much the same way the sun outshines all of the other stars. It doesn’t help that much of his other work is so thematically similar to his two big novels. I never read any of the ones you mention (probably because two of them were assigned), but I did read Burmese Days and thought it was wonderful. Of course I was 15 or so. ---
**Author:** ![glaeken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@glaeken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glaeken)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/12 "2013-01-16T10:14:28Z")
I have read all of Orwell’s novels and think he is actually mostly very good. My favourite Orwell is actually Coming up for Air. I think with Orwell it’s not that he varied a lot in quality it’s that two of his works for whatever reason became far more famous than the others. Presumably because they dealt with a particularly hot topic of the time. When it comes to novels he also really was not very prolific so actually two out of seven of them being considered great actually represents virtually 30% of his output which is not too bad a hit ratio. I would actually personally say three out of the seven are great so that puts him at almost 50% which is none too shabby. ---
**Author:** ![F.U.Shakespeare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/aca169/32.png) [@F.U.Shakespeare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.U.Shakespeare)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/13 "2013-01-16T11:22:27Z")
The song “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals. ---
**Author:** ![DragonAsh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/db5fbb/32.png) [@DragonAsh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DragonAsh)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/14 "2013-01-16T11:42:04Z")
Orwell might be a bad example - he was first and foremost a journalist, even though nowadays people know him for his novels. But he only wrote six pieces of fiction, and two of them are all-time great classics, which I’d say is a pretty good batting average. Slightly unfair, 'cause she didn’t write anything else, but Harper Lee wrote one of the truely great American novels, then basically didn’t publish another word for the rest of her life. In her case, it was (in her own words), " I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again" David & David published one very good album in the late 80s, and weren’t ever really heard from again. ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/15 "2013-01-16T12:37:16Z")
> [@denquixote](#): > > Joseph Heller - Catch-22 > J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye > Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner > Jack Kerouac - On The Road > Dennis Hopper - Easy Rider (as a director) > Norm Cash - 1961 baseball season Detroit first baseman > Steve Fisher - 1989 NCAA basketball tournament Michigan coach > Don Larsen - Game 7 1956 World Series Yankee pitcher > The Band - Music From Big Pink > Otis Redding - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay > Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume One Larsen’s perfect game was game 5 ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/16 "2013-01-16T12:48:24Z")
I’d go for _Pet Sounds_, myself. I like the Beach Boys other work well enough, but _Pet Sounds_ is just transcendant. I don’t really agree with _American Idiot_ being head-and-shoulders above everything Green Day has ever done (I’d actually peg their best album at _Dookie_, although _American Idiot_ is a close second), but I’ll put in my own controversial vote and go with GnR’s _Appetite for Destruction_. I’m just not a fan of anything they’ve done since. I also agree with Liz Phair’s _Exile in Guyville_. There’s a couple good tracks on the next two albums, but nothing comes close to her debut. ---
**Author:** ![corkboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@corkboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/corkboard)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/17 "2013-01-16T13:52:19Z")
By all accounts Steig Larsson was a hack journalist before coming out with the “The Girl…” trilogy, unless you believe those that claim his wife wrote them. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/18 "2013-01-16T14:03:00Z")
[Joe Johnston](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002653/) directed a series of mediocre-to-good action adventure movies; some are well-liked, but none are really much more than throwaway entertainment. He also did **October Sky** , a straight biopic about teenagers with an interest in rocketry in the 1950s. It’s a far better movie than any of his others, and in a completely different genre. ---
**Author:** ![It\_s\_Not\_Rocket\_Surgery](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/it_s_not_rocket_surgery/32/312_2.png) [@It\_s\_Not\_Rocket\_Surgery](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/It_s_Not_Rocket_Surgery)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/19 "2013-01-16T14:40:15Z")
> [@denquixote](#): > > Joseph Heller - Catch-22 > J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye > Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner > Jack Kerouac - On The Road > Dennis Hopper - Easy Rider (as a director) > Norm Cash - 1961 baseball season Detroit first baseman > Steve Fisher - 1989 NCAA basketball tournament Michigan coach > Don Larsen - Game 7 1956 World Series Yankee pitcher > The Band - Music From Big Pink > Otis Redding - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay > Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume One If we are introducing sports figures into this, then I’ll add [Buster Douglas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Douglas). ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317/20 "2013-01-16T15:03:54Z")
Well, there’s Halle Berry in _Monster’s Ball_, and then Halle Berry in everything else. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-that-come-from-artists-who-put-out-one-awesome-work/647317.md?page=2)