When a Band or Artist Changes and Gets Better

We are probably all familiar with the negative side of change when it happens to a group or solo artist we like. There can be any number of reasons why musicians and singers lose that muse that made us originally love them. For some, they become wealthy and take the opportunity to be so self-indulgent that they no longer have anything interesting to say musically. For others its because they start taking higher doses of certain drugs, or change to different drugs, which effectively changes the whole character of their music. For others, it seems like life just starts to intimidate them, they begin to lose their youthful passion, and then start to "play it safe" with their music, resulting in a musical output less stimulating for the listener. Then there is the theory that an artist needs to be "hungry" to be good, and that once they are financially secure so goes the spark informing the quality of their music -- this theory seems disproved by Bruce Springsteen, who has kept "the hungry" in his music despite all his mounting success down through the years. Indeed, change does not always have to be negative. There are cases when it is quite a good thing. There are artists (at least up to a point) where a person likes them more as they evolve. That is the key word: evolve. When change is negative, it is not because the artist is evolving but rather they are either retreating from their original passion or rehashing earlier tropes with diminishing inspiration. The trick is for the rock or pop artist not to lose sight of the fact that what they are doing is a form of art and not merely a formulaic business of noise-making where you hope to push the profitable buttons in the music-making doframus. There are great examples of evolution where groups or individuals kept renewing themselves in fresh and beautiful ways while remaining true to their identity: Jethro Tull from the late sixties and through the seventies into the early eighties, blending and developing various permutations of blues rock, folk rock, prog rock and operatic rock; Elton John from the late sixties into the late seventies, going from singer/songwriter to glam rocker to passionate rock and roller. However, my favorite case is The Kinks, and here I am only interested in mapping their mid sixties to early seventies output. They went from unhinged blues rockers and ecstatic mod punks, to astutely satirical and trenchantly poetic observers of urban life, to epic tragedians and fond odesters of the transformations of working class identity and its retention of a Gothic imagination. What a journey -- and I'm not just talking about the lyrics!