Let artists grow!

There’s a strange, albeit not particularly surprising, tendency among early fans of musical artists (and groups, bands, and so on) to gripe about how the artist that once showed so much promise has failed to follow some nebulous prescribed path within their genre that the fan hoped for when they first laid ears on whatever charmingly scrappy output the artist began with. I feel like this has happened to pretty much every artist I’ve started listening to relatively early in their career and who have since had some bout of meteoric growth (at least on an indie scale), with Japanese Breakfast, Let’s Eat Grandma, Daughter, and CHVRCHES particularly coming to mind. And it makes me wonder what these fans really wanted, if not the impossible reignition of whatever nostalgia fuels their love for that early work. Must an artist remain charming and scrappy forever?

The four aforementioned projects are all at somewhat similar stages, two of them being three albums in while the others are four. At least three of them share this experience of being in a transition point between cult classic adoration and broader notoriety, which perhaps is the perfect stage for this phenomenon to take place, where the original “fans” come out of the woodworks to simultaneously brag about their earlier discovery of the music while also complaining about its current evolution. Japanese Breakfast skyrocketed in popularity with her most recent album, the Grammy-nominated Jubilee, along with her bestselling memoir that released the same year. Let’s Eat Grandma, whose members have made headlines since the band’s inception for being wunderkinds on the UK music scene, has gained broader fandom after one of its members, Rosa Walton, composed a pop song for the Cyberpunk videogame and anime series, a song that has far more mainstream sensibilities than the group’s usual work. CHVRCHES, in recent years, has seen collaborations with the likes of Marshmello and The Cure’s Robert Smith, along with providing the lead single to a hit videogame’s soundtrack.

What fascinates me about these groups in particular is that their early sounds are all very much “of their time,” whether in the context of the artist’s life or in the context of the greater music scene. Should we really expect Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingsworth of Let’s Eat Grandma to have the same sensibilities now as they did when they were as young as 15 (when even their voices had a teenaged squeakiness that has since matured), having gone through some of the most emotionally complicated stages of a person’s life in the meantime? Should Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast be expected to maintain that bedroom recording rawness that defined Psychopomp, a record that is very much tied to her mother’s then-recent passing? Would the firmly early 2010s dark synthpop soundscapes of CHVRCHES’ infancy even make sense in today’s music landscape as anything but a winking throwback to “better (nostalgic) times”? (I suppose that’s what it already was at the time, but it still served as a contemporary evolution of that existing sound.)

In part it comes down to a snotty repulsion towards pop, a genre that, by the way, these artists only vaguely flirt with in the grander scheme of things. That said, pop is pop, and Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee is surely an all-timer in the genre’s pantheon, so can’t we be grateful? As much as I adore each of these bands’ early output, I can at least acknowledge that something has to be lost in order for something to be gained, and I feel that each has made some of their best music in the past couple years. Every artist in any medium is constantly evolving, yet some fans can’t help but feel alienated when the sound shifts away from what they know and love.

I find this to be an issue with how fans approach art in general, which is to say it certainly isn’t exclusive to music. There’s a certain entitlement that fans feel over an artist’s output, especially if they were “there from the beginning.” They see art as being for the fans, not for the artist, and they spend too much time wringing their hands over what could have been that they don’t acknowledge what actually is. I also suspect there’s an element of being unable to parse their feelings about a piece of art properly, where they can’t separate the baggage of a decade-old album from the thing itself, where there might just be that incomparable excitement of discovery that can’t be recreated with new work, there’s that nostalgia that of course poisons everything, there’s that inseparable connection to emotions of the time period. People just want to feel exactly as they once did, and they blame the artist for not providing this to them. But why not open yourself up to the new feelings of the present?

You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned Daughter yet, which is because they don’t really fit alongside the pattern of the other three projects. There hasn’t been some recent catalyst that would offer them the rapid growth of their popularity, instead their sound has evolved as any band’s would, and their fandom has grown in a natural, steady way. The reason I bring them up alongside the others, though, is because you can very specifically trace where their fans have come from and why they approach the music the way they do. Much of Daughter’s popularity comes from the height of 2010s depression-addled Tumblr, which was rife with “aesthetic” presentations of Daughter lyrics, largely created and interacted with by young teenagers and preteens. In part these lyrics were used by fans to represent their adolescent angst in some indirect way, but they were also partially cosplaying the complexity of emotion present in those words, engaging with them empathetically in whatever extent their young minds and hearts were capable of. Elena Tonra is singing from the perspective of someone on the precipice of adulthood, wallowing in nostalgia and lamenting lost childhood, crooning lyrics like “And if you’re still breathing, you’re the lucky ones / ’cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs,” to which her young fans respond, “so true,” with no acknowledgement of the irony.

So it’s easy to see why Daughter’s first album and preceding EPs would carry a very specific baggage for many of their fans, a middle school nostalgia that couldn’t possibly be accessed through something new. Daugher is an interesting case because, more so than the other three groups I’ve mentioned, their sound has not changed significantly. They’ve approached it from a more mature perspective, sure, but they haven’t had drastic evolutions in the tone they’re going for. There’s no reason for fans to deride them for going too mainstream, for leaning too much into pop sensibilities, for appealing to a mythical lowest common denominator (an accusation that’s certainly been thrown at CHVRCHES).

And yet there’s still an overall air of disappointment around their more recent music (especially 2016’s Not to Disappear, their sophomore full-length album) for simply not being the same, for daring to try something even obliquely new. Daughter sort of acknowledged this by taking a lengthy break in traditional releases, leaving a 7 year gap between their second and third albums, that time being filled with a videogame soundtrack album and a solo album from Tonra, thus explicitly emphasizing that she is not the same as she was all those years ago, nor are any of the members. In a way, it felt like a gentle act of defiance of emotional fans’ mentality towards the band’s work. In that sense, Daughter is kind of the example that proves what I already suspect of those other three bands, that even if they did follow the exact evolutionary path expected of them, it would still not appease some of those ground floor fans who can’t separate the music from the nostalgia.

I can’t implicate Daughter’s fans with the most hipster-inclined of the other groups’ devotees, because I think there’s more self-awareness on their part about where their love for the band originates, and it seems like many of those initial fans look back on Daughter as something that once existed and is no longer, even as they continue to make new music (this mentality was probably enabled by that aforementioned break in the band’s discography). It all boils down the same, though: If you want to acknowledge the humanity in these artists, you have to acknowledge that they will change with time. Most artists yearn to grow as much as artists as they do as people, to always be upgrading and evolving their sound, and it’s not really fair to expect them to never leave their bedroom. Appreciate those early works for what they are, for the time period and people they represent, and understand you can always return to them. That new stuff, though? Listen to it with the new ears that time has granted you. It’s the least you can do in exchange for someone’s art.

All images are composed of modified photos from the following authors under Creative Commons:

David Lee (Japanese Breakfast 1 and 2)
Jwslubbock (Let’s Eat Grandma 1)
Raph_PH (Let’s Eat Grandma 2)
Jeremiah Andrick (CHVRCHES 1)
Justin Higuchi (CHVRCHES 2)
Cindy Stuntz (Daughter 1)
Pedro Mora (Daughter 2)

Because some of these photos are distributed under a CC-by-SA license, all images in this post can also be used under the same terms.