3 Artists Who Rose From the Ashes After Career-Ending Records

Career-ending records typically happen to every big-name musician out there. No one can stay famous forever. It’ll take one major dip on the charts for an artist to find themselves irrelevant, with no choice but to pass the torch on to more modern musicians. But that wasn’t the case for the following three artists, each of whom released albums that could have tanked their careers. With a little ingenuity, they saved their careers in inspiring ways after the fact. Let’s take a look!

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Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan released some very experimental work back in the day, and he has never been the kind of artist to simply do what critics (or fans) want him to. Enter Self Portrait from 1970, a folk rock album in which Dylan takes on a vast majority of cover songs over new material. Critics ripped it apart, and fans hated it. And according to Dylan, that was the point. 

“There’d be crowds outside my house,” Dylan said of the success of his previous releases. “And I said, ‘Well, f*ck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want,’ you know? They’ll go on to somebody else.”

Dylan would release New Morning just a few months later, which would be met with a much warmer reception from just about everyone.

Madonna

Madonna makes it to our list of artists who saved their careers after career-ending records with one of my personal favorite pop records of the 1990s.

Ray Of Light, released in 1998, is one of Madonna’s absolute best records. Interestingly enough, it came to be after the rough release of Erotica in 1992, which did well, but was shot down by many critics for being too sexual. Bedtime Stories from 1994 also didn’t do as well as much of Madonna’s previous material. Then, the very spiritual trip-hop classic Ray Of Light dropped, and it was almost a No. 1 hit across the board, selling double the copies of her previous release.

Johnny Cash

In the 1980s, country icon Johnny Cash ran into the same problem that many aging icons do. His music wasn’t quite resonating with then-modern-day audiences, his label dropped him, and he had almost slipped into irrelevancy. There was no one career-ending album; instead, his records just tapered off the charts. That is, until the mid-1990s, when he came back around with American Recordings. That album marked an incredible career resurgence for Cash that carried into the 2000s, thanks to some help from producer Rick Rubin.

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