This is a quote from the producer of Talk Talk's 1991 album Laughing Stock. This would ultimately be the band's last album, and it would widely come to be regarded as their 'Masterwork.'

I'm not the kind of person that likes to put ratings on art. As a teenager I had many joyful hours delving through the depths of Rateyourmusic.com and updating my ratings almost every day as my tastes changed. However, after a few years, trying to listen to all the music in the world got too overwhelming. I stopped rating music and started listening to only 1 or 2 new albums a month - fully focusing on experiencing & living with the music rather than spending the whole time trying to think of what number to give it to assign it some abstract worth. I say all this as I am about to use public music ratings as a way to measure a piece of art's worth even though I don't believe in such things (always good to start with a contradiction). I'm going to be using ratings merely as a means of showing widespread acclaim/consensus here in the music listening communities of cyberspace.

This is the Discography of Talk Talk as seen on Rateyourmusic. The ratings fall on a 0.5 to 5.0 scale aggregated from all user scores on the website. A score of 3.5-3.6 is typically seen as a good album from an artist. A score of 3.8-3.9 is usually viewed as one of the finest albums released in a year. Anything above a 4.0 is a rarity and is widely regarded as a 'Masterpiece' (e.g. A Love Supreme, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Fôrça bruta, and Ys).

With this in mind, we return to Talk Talk's discography and see a slope from their first release in 1982 until their final album in 1991. This feels like it makes sense. This is how it should be right? Artists get better over time. A slow but incremental pace of practice, experience, and improving so that when you first start out you won't be very good, but after years of work you've been able to master your craft.

Here is another example of this progress over a discography from the band Fishmans where a decade of work ultimately culminates in their final masterpiece. -And again this feels like it makes sense. There is an almost story-like quality to this arc of art.

But this is not at all the norm. It is incredibly rare for an artist's life of work to follow this clean pattern. A very common occurrence is an early peak followed by releases that fans of the band never love as much and have to go around saying the "I like their older stuff" cliche.

Here are examples from the discographies of Built to Spill, Novos Baianos, and Pixies. Musicianship is a craft, in the same way that it is for a baker, a cobbler, or a tailor. You can learn an instrument and you can learn a song for that instrument and perfect it and keep playing it over and over again until your body falls apart. However, the artistic expression within your medium is not as much of a craft as it is an art. You can't refine your heart to push out dozens of songs a day - that only works following a recipe to make the same loaf of bread or same shoe over and over again. A human life is not a simple straight path of progress, and our artistic expression reflects that.

This is a much more interesting - and much more accurate way to approach an artist's life of work, which has become more prevalent recently with fans often assigning "eras" to an artist's discography. It goes back to literary analysis and art history having used similar terms to describe the different seasons an artist will go through (e.g. Picasso's Blue Period & Rose Period). A notable early example of this in popular recording music is David Bowie (from the Ziggy Stardust Persona to the Berlin Trilogy). And from here we can see any number of examples of this. Bob Dylan being known for his Acoustic to Electric - his Heartbreak & Religious. Björk known for every album taking place in a new world of visuals, philosophy, and approach to sound.

Fans love to argue about which era was best - what was the true masterpiece - what they wish was never released. I think that can be a lot of fun, but it misses the heart of art. It's a tool of communication. It's a means of expression. A way to get something out of your heart and into the world. I think this is why a lot of artists people really love and resonate with follow this pattern of great change throughout the years. The reason you can connect so deeply with the art is that it's truly reflecting where people were in their life when they made it. It's not always a straight progression towards perfection - it's the ebbs and flows of life. The changes and turns in the river.