You don’t study music as long as I have without noticing some distinct patterns in your own and others’ listening habits. One thing that has been popping up lately is what fans expect from musicians, and what musicians are delivering. There are conflicts between fan and musician, and conflicts between fan groups. (For a really in-depth, academic take on this general subject, please visit It Is What It Is; my post will be concerned only with albums.)

While, in my opinion, the album as an art form has declined from its peak of cohesiveness in the late 60s and early 70s, albums continued to be the major form of music purchase until the digital revolution. Most musicians are still dedicated to the idea of the album, the process of writing (or vetting) dozens of songs before winnowing it down to 10 or 12 that will form some kind of statement about who the artist is or what sort of music s/he is into at the time.

Thus, unfortunately, there is plenty of room for fans to be disappointed.

Noel Murray at A.V. Club recently discussed his method for not being disappointed. He simply doesn’t become a fan of anyone until their third, fourth, or fifth album, thereby not getting so involved in their early work that any later change/growth becomes “bad” to him. This makes sense, as most artists (especially young songwriters) do not hit their stride until after the first few albums.

He explains: “Many’s the time I’ve started to develop an appreciation for a singer-songwriter or band around the time of their fourth or fifth album, only to hear that old defeatist call: ‘Their old stuff was better.’” By leaving the first few albums “on the shelf”, “we can come to them later and have a whole body of work to dig back into, with a greater sense of context for where an act might be headed.”

This is how (mostly due to being born in 1980) I discovered the Beatles and the Beach Boys. I literally started with a tape of Sgt. Pepper, memorizing every nuance, then worked my way backwards to Meet The Beatles, then forward until I caught up to the present releases of archival and alternate-version material. Then I moved laterally to Pet Sounds, backwards and forwards again until I had a pretty hefty collection of vinyl, cassettes and CDs. And books; I am also a reader of biographies both authorized and non.

Then again, sometimes you can’t help but get in on the ground floor with an artist. Blogger and entertainment lawyer Bob Lefsetz received an advance copy of U2’s new album, No Line On The Horizon, and gave it a spin. He’s been disappointed by Bono et al the last ten years or so, but of the new effort he says, “This ain’t no clunker, this ain’t no ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’, it certainly ain’t no ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’, this is a complete return to form. I’m stunned.”

Perhaps for U2, this is a good thing. Per Lefsetz, and also per my own listening experience with U2, they have been more concerned with the bottom line than with artistry, churning out what sounded like the same glossy song over and over again, just with different lyrics. Lefsetz says, “Albums are for fans, they shouldn’t be grist for the mill.” A return to the original formula, then, is approved by U2 fans… much like Coca-Cola.

But should fans be encouraged or allowed to wallow in the past, to put artists in boxes and demand their adherence to the sound that made them famous? If fans want both an old sound and current chart success, is this contradictory or delusional?

Taylor Hicks has a new album coming out on March 10. The Distance has already become an object of contention for Hicks’ fans, although to be honest they can always find something to argue about. The full album is available to listen to on Kids AOL (no idea why…) and thus there are vast amounts of fodder for the fans to chew on.

Hicks has only been on the national stage for three years. He has released one album of new music since winning American Idol, 2006’s Taylor Hicks. He has also re-released his pre-Idol music, which a majority of fans seem to consider “the real Taylor” — the post-Idol release deemed too “commercial”. However, despite going multi-platinum, the album has also been considered a “commercial failure”. The fans want Hicks to be successful, to sell many albums, to be a household name, to sell out stadiums. They also want raw, dirty, bar-singer blues and soul, and they want every album to be entirely written by Hicks, preferably without any co-writers.

Does anyone else see how these things might possibly conflict?

Raw, dirty, bar-singer blues and soul has never sold well. Those bluesmen (and women) who became famous only did so when their music was somewhat cleaned up, polished and made palatable to the average white American radio listener. Currently, even hip-hop and hard rock are more pop-like and glossy than their genre-creating forebears. If Hicks is going to sell soul, he’s going to do it in a clean Motown way, not the way he played (and still plays) it in bars. This is and has been a truth of the music industry: there has to be some homogenization if you’re going to appeal to the masses. It’s true of politics, too!

While I have not yet listened to The Distance, preferring to play it for the first time on much better speakers than those built into my laptop, I have read enough of the preliminary “reviews” from fans that I can say with certainty the following: Hicks did not write a majority of songs on this album; the songs are not necessarily blues or soul; there is at least one song that will get a ton of country radio play.

Do these things make this album bad? No. They make it different from his other albums. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to grow, to learn, to write a ton of songs and then decide they suck so much that he needs to record other peoples’ songs in order to have a good album? More power to him, for that! But when people have such narrow expectations — or not even expectations, but requirements — in order to be satisfied, of course they shall not be satisfied.

This applies to all artists, not only Taylor Hicks. Try to keep an open mind. Try to appreciate an album on its own merits; do not hold it up to past albums. If you love Achtung Baby or Under The Radar or Meet The Beatles so very much that nothing that follows can ever satisfy you, then please do not listen to anything new. Live in your vacuum of the past. Stay off Internet forums, too.

For me, I will try to love each album for what it is. I will try to love each artist both for who they were and who they have become, and even for who they may become in the future. Any human who does not learn, change, and grow is a sad, sad person indeed. Why wish that on a musician you claim to love?