Longest Wait Between Albums

Call us impatient, but it can be frustrating when our favorite artists take a vacation from the studio and create years of hang time between new albums. These are the artists from whom we’ve had to wait the longest for new material, and whose back catalogs we listened to on repeat in the mean time. Bruce Springsteen Wait Time: Seven Years The seven years that elapsed between 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad and 2002’s The Rising represented the longest gap between new studio album releases in Bruce Springsteen's storied career. Since that September 11th inspired LP, there has been a comparative flood of new Springsteen material:  Devils & Dust, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Magic and Working on a Dream – which all came out between 2002 and 2009. Incubus Wait Time: Five Years It took SoCal based Incubus five years to record 2011’s appropriately titled If Not Now, When?, the long-awaited follow-up to their 2006 album Light Grenades. In the half decade between albums, the band went on a hiatus, during which lead singer Brandon Boyd enrolled in art school, guitarist Mike Einziger studied music composition at Harvard and drummer José Pasillas had a baby. Said Boyd, “There's a lot of normal life stuff going on right now—school, babies, mortgages. I'm of the mind to say it wouldn't be a bad thing to disappear for a year or two years. A lot of people would say culture moves too fast and you need to remind people, but I would argue there's not any rush." Guns N' Roses Wait Time: Fourteen Years The prize for longest wait for an album goes to Guns N' Rose’s fourteen years in the making of Chinese Democracy. Axl Rose, (the only original member of GNR involved in the recording process), delayed the follow-up to 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident with a production style described by many overseers as “obsessive.” It was no surprise then that when the album was finally released, many reviews called the album “overproduced.” In an open letter to fans, Rose wrote: “To say the making of this album has been an unbearably long and incomprehensible journey would be an understatement.” We feel the same way about the wait. Be sure to check out: Hometown: The String Quartet Tribute to Bruce Springsteen Available now at iTunes and Amazon The String Quartet Tribute to Incubus Available now at iTunes and Amazon The String Quartet Tribute to Incubus Vol.2 Available now at iTunes and Amazon The String Quartet Tribute to Guns N' Roses Available now at iTunes and Amazon