Maintaining a decades-long career, releasing hit album after hit album, is no small challenge. Thus, it’s no surprise that some artists step away from music for years. When the truly special musicians make their return, though, they do so in incredible fashion.
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Read on for three of the best classic rock comeback albums ever.
Aerosmith’s ‘Permanent Vacation’
The 1985 release of Done With Mirrors was intended to mark Aerosmith’s comeback. However, Joe Perry and Brad Whitford’s returns were not enough for the LP to be a success. Two years later, however, Aerosmith made their true comeback when they released Permanent Vacation.
The album marked the first time that the band collaborated with songwriters outside of their group, which Perry believed to be a key to the album’s success.
“I think that was a big influence because you learn so much when you’re writing with other people,” he told Ultimate Classic Rock in 2017. “You learn more about the craft, so to speak… There are a million different ways to write songs, what the drive is – that kind of thing. That opened, creatively, a lot of doors.”
The LP, the band’s ninth overall, became Aerosmith’s biggest release in a decade, peaking at No. 11 on the Billboard 200. Three songs on the record—”Rag Doll”, “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)”, and “Angel”—were Top 20 hits.
Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Rising’
When Bruce Springsteen released The Rising in 2002, it was a comeback in many ways. Springsteen’s 12th LP came seven years after the release of his last album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, the longest such break in the musician’s career. It also marked Springsteen’s reunion with the E Street Band after almost two decades apart.
“My big question when I put the band back together was if we were going to have real work left to do. I wasn’t interested in just going out and repeating what we’ve done,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone in 2009. “I was interested in a renewal of the band — and that meant I would need to write the kind of music that would stand alongside our best records and feel connected to the sense of purpose that the band strove for since its inception.”
Largely written in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, The Rising topped the Billboard 200 and won Springsteen two GRAMMYs.
“The Rising came, obviously, directly out of 9/11,” Springsteen told the outlet. “But it wasn’t purely linked to the event, either, if you go back and listen to the way the music was written; it was broad enough to be political, personal, of the moment.”
John Fogerty’s ‘Centerfield’
Centerfield was a huge comeback for John Fogerty, marking his first solo classic rock album in nine years. The 1985 release, which topped the Billboard 200 chart, included the hit track “The Old Man Down The Road”. The song was Fogerty’s only Top 10 hit of his career.
In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, Fogerty opened up about the name of the album. He revealed that, as a Yankees fan in the Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle era, he became in awe of the center field position.
“I came to feel that the center fielder seemed to be the king, the head of the tribe, the most special one,” Fogerty said of his childhood realization. “… [In naming the album] basically, I was reconnecting with that very special feeling I had about center field as a kid.”
“People didn’t know what it meant, but it was important to me,” he added. “It took me a while to remember about center field and how I felt about it, but once it came into my mind, I thought: ‘Oh, that’s perfect. That’s exactly what I want to say.’”
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