"Like all bands, the first two albums are always the ones most written about, and the most covered. When a band gets to their third of fourth album, the story of the band has already been told"
About this Quote
Kelly Jones is calling out a lazy cultural script: rock history loves an origin story and rarely knows what to do with adulthood. The first records come with built-in drama - hunger, discovery, the myth of the garage years. Critics can narrativize them as fate. By the third or fourth album, the band is no longer an underdog; it is an institution with invoices, expectations, and a back catalog. That shift makes the music harder to package, so coverage thins and the conversation calcifies around an early, supposedly pure moment.
The intent isn’t to dismiss later work so much as to indict the ecosystem that rewards beginnings. Jones points at how “the story” becomes a product: once it’s been told, it gets repeated, covered, endlessly re-covered. The word “covered” does double duty, too. It’s about other artists replaying the early songs, but also about media coverage treating those songs as the definitive text. After that, new releases are reviewed against the legend instead of met on their own terms.
The subtext is a musician’s frustration with narrative gravity. Bands keep living, writing, changing; the culture wants a tidy arc it can quote. In the 1990s and 2000s British guitar scene Jones comes from, that effect is amplified: press cycles fetishized debuts and “difficult second albums,” then moved on to the next wave. His line lands because it’s both resigned and accusatory - a reminder that what gets remembered isn’t always what’s best, just what’s easiest to mythologize.
The intent isn’t to dismiss later work so much as to indict the ecosystem that rewards beginnings. Jones points at how “the story” becomes a product: once it’s been told, it gets repeated, covered, endlessly re-covered. The word “covered” does double duty, too. It’s about other artists replaying the early songs, but also about media coverage treating those songs as the definitive text. After that, new releases are reviewed against the legend instead of met on their own terms.
The subtext is a musician’s frustration with narrative gravity. Bands keep living, writing, changing; the culture wants a tidy arc it can quote. In the 1990s and 2000s British guitar scene Jones comes from, that effect is amplified: press cycles fetishized debuts and “difficult second albums,” then moved on to the next wave. His line lands because it’s both resigned and accusatory - a reminder that what gets remembered isn’t always what’s best, just what’s easiest to mythologize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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