The end of the line for many musicians came way too early, while they still had work to be done. For some this was as a result of accidental overdose, for others illness took them, often before their time. In sadly too many cases, suicide was the cause of death and in one infamous case, a gunman’s bullets extinguished the light.
This selection makes for such varied but essential listening that it only begs the question of what the artist in question would have thought had they only been able to enjoy their success.
Classic posthumous rock albums
1. Otis Redding – Dock of the Bay (1968)
‘(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay’ became the first posthumous single ever to top the US Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in January 1968, just a month after the supremely talented soul singer died when his plane crashed into Lake Monona, Wisconsin.
The album of (almost) the same name followed the next month, and showcased the talents of arguably the greatest male soul singer who ever lived. Dock of the Bay had been completed just two days before his death, and as well as the title song, includes some of Redding’s finest works.
‘I Love You More Than Words Can Say’, ‘The Glory of Love’ and ‘Nobody Knows You (When You're Down and Out)’ reveal the bluesy, raw passion of his delivery, while ‘Tramp’, a duet with Stax labelmate Carla Thomas drips with sass.
2. Janis Joplin – Pearl (1971)
On 4 October 1970, Janis Joplin died from a heroin overdose at her Hollywood hotel. She had been in the final throes of completing the album that, as her most consistently brilliant work to date, would surely have catapulted her to the stars.
Channelling the impassioned holler of Big Mama Thornton, the blues grit of Bessie Smith and Odetta’s gutsy gospel, Joplin’s delivery is otherworldly, soulful and so, so good. And yet, while bearing these influences, she sounds like nobody else before or since.
Pearl sees her embrace three soulful songs by legendary soul songwriter Jerry Ragovy, whose ‘Piece Of My Heart’ had been a hit for her in 1968 – ‘Get It While You Can’, ‘My Baby’ and a phenomenal take on ‘Cry Baby’, a gorgeous piece of romantic soul in the hands of Garnett Mimms that is reinvented here as a tour de force with enough oomph to knock the listener clean off their feet.
But it is Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me And Bobby McGee’ that steals the show, exposing Joplin’s vulnerability alongside her trademark swagger – a very appealing dichotomy.
As with so many of the records on this list, Pearl leaves the listener wondering what on earth she may have done had she lived beyond the tender age of 27.
3. Jimi Hendrix – The Cry of Love (1971)
Surely no artist in history can have had as many posthumous releases as James Marshall Hendrix. His three studio albums with the Jimi Hendrix Experience are all classics, while a seemingly endless list of live albums serves as testament to his status as perhaps rock’s greatest guitar slinger.
But it’s in a seemingly endless line of posthumous studio albums that the confusion reigns – and this isn’t the place to attempt to dissect them all.
A trio of archival recordings in the 2010s sought to definitively deliver a comprehensive idea of what Jimi may have released as the follow up to 1968’s Electric Ladyland, but it is still the 1971 release, The Cry Of Love, that deserves the title of Jimi’s final album.
Recording mostly during Jimi’s final year, 1970, The Cry Of Love can only make the listener dream of what may have been had the American guitar player not died at the age of just 27.
Jimi’s songwriting and playing soar throughout – the driving riff of ‘Ezy Ryder’ finds Jimi firmly into his groove, while ‘Angel’ is a towering piece and a fitting tribute to his unique talent.
4. Gram Parsons – Grievous Angel (1974)
His light shone brightly but flickered out way too soon. Perhaps the most influential figure in the story of country-rock music, Parsons was a member of both the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
He became close friends with the Rolling Stones, especially Keith Richards, whose legendary bottomless appetite for drugs and drink Parsons matched, and lived among them during the infamous sessions for their Exile on Main Street album (1972). But on returning to his native US, Parsons hooked up with Emmylou Harris, recording his debut solo LP GP (1973) with her, and members of Elvis Presley’s Vegas band.
For the follow up, the posthumously released Grievous Angel (1974), Parsons resumed work with the same crew, and delivered perhaps his finest work. ‘Brass Buttons’ is an achingly beautiful hymn to his deceased mother, while ‘In My Hour Of Darkness’, a song about three friends’ deaths, feels heart-breakingly poignant in light of Parsons’ own death.
Along with Nina Simone’s ‘Let It Be Me’, ‘Love Hurts’ may be the best cover of any Everly Brothers’ song – which is some accolade.
Parsons continued to struggle with drink and drugs, and celebrations after the completion of the album at Joshua Tree National Monument in California turned into tragedy. Parsons died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and morphine on 19 September 1974 at the tender age of just 26.
5. Joy Division – Closer (1980)
Born in Manchester, England, Ian Curtis was the enigmatic frontman and lyricist for the hauntingly atmospheric post-punk band Joy Division.
During the band’s rise, Curtis began to suffer from increasingly severe epilepsy, for which he was prescribed heavy medication. This came with side effects such as extreme mood swings.
In May 1980, on the eve of the band’s departure for a North American tour, he took his own life at home in Macclesfield.
The tragedy was compacted with the release in July that year of Closer, an album that showed Curtis and his bandmates to have reached hitherto unimagined heights. The album was flawless.
Shards of guitar shatter through Can-esque drum patterns and melodic bass motifs, while futuristic synthesisers add to the effect that this is an album unlike any other. On top, Curtis’s haunting, powerful vocals steal the show.
Later editions add the standalone single ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, which has today become an unlikely universal anthem, played at football matches, but it’s on tracks like ‘Isolation’, ‘Heart and Soul’, ’24 Hours’ and the powerful final track, ‘Decades’, that Curtis’ genius shines through most.
6. John Lennon – Milk & Honey (1984)
In the months before his shocking murder outside of his New York City home on 8 December 1980, John Lennon had returned to music after a hiatus of almost five years.
November 1980 saw the release of Double Fantasy, his first album of original songs since Walls & Bridges (1974), and he and wife Yoko Ono were well into sessions for the follow up. Lennon told reporters in December 1980 that they were already halfway through the record and would likely finish it up after Christmas.
Tragically, that never happened.
And it would be another three years before Ono felt able to complete the project, which she titled Milk & Honey. Released in January 1983, the album spawned a hit single in ‘Nobody Told Me’.
As with Double Fantasy, the format was of John and Yoko’s songs alternating with each other. By their very nature, John’s songs sound less finished – they were, after all, still works in progress – while Yoko’s were mainly recorded closer to the release date and sounded more polished and contemporary.
Yet it would be the only song not recorded in the studio that would carry the most poignancy. Inspired by the English poet Robert Browning’s poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, John wrote a song called ‘Grow Old With Me’, the only recording of which is featured here.
It was recorded on a portable cassette machine in the couple‘s bedroom using just piano and an early drum machine. On it, the 40-year-old Lennon sings ‘Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be’.
7. Nirvana – MTV Unplugged in New York (1994)
OK, so unlike the others on this list, Nirvana’s legendary performance on MTV Unplugged isn’t a studio album, but given how intrinsically embedded it’s become into their catalogue, we felt that justified its inclusion.
Besides, how can we ignore a record that includes the Seattle group’s takes on songs like David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and Lead Belly’s haunting ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’?
Recorded in November 1993, but not released until a year later, the album possesses a dark intensity only amplified by the time of release by Kurt Cobain’s suicide in April 1993.
Unlike the majority of MTV Unplugged shows to date, Nirvana wanted to deliver something beyond a greatest hits set played on acoustic guitars, and so as well as covers that includes songs by the Vaselines and the Meat Puppets, the set featured few of the band’s best-known songs.
There was no ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for starters. Instead, the band raided their catalogue for songs that would suit both the format, and Cobain’s current state.
The stripped back arrangements exposed the enormous power of Cobain’s vocal delivery – with the close of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ leaving the listener utterly exposed to his pain. Harrowing, but brilliant.
8. Queen – Made In Heaven (1995)
Uniquely in this list, Queen’s Made In Heaven was created in the full knowledge that it would be a posthumous release.
In 1991, conscious that he was dying from AIDS/HIV, Freddie Mercury worked as hard as his debilitating illness would allow, recording vocal parts with instructions for bandmates Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon of his ideas for how they might complete the tracks after his death.
It was painful and painstaking, but Freddie was determined and somehow delivered performances every bit as good as on other Queen LPs.
Freddie died at home in London in November 1991, and it would be another two years before his bandmates could resume work, coming together in 1993 to finish the album using Freddie’s vocals, alongside newly recorded material, and, touchingly, by revisiting recordings from their collective past.
The result was impressive – arguably better than the previous two or three Queen LPs at least.
There are a number of particularly emotional moments – the end of the evocative ballad ‘Mother Love’ finds May singing the last verse, as this was the point at which Mercury’s incredible resilience finally ran out and he was unable to complete the song.
Another key moment is ‘A Winter’s Tale’, the last song Mercury completed. And finally, the reprise of ‘It’s A Beautiful Day’ sees Mercury sign out singing ‘I feel good, I feel right/ And no one, no one's Gonna stop me now’, underpinned by samples of their first hit, ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’.
9. George Harrison – Brainwashed (2002)
To say that he wasn’t prolific towards the latter part of his career would be to do George Harrison a disservice.
To the end, he busied himself with the things that mattered most to him – his family, the gardens of his extraordinary estate on the edge of Henley-On-Thames, Indian music and his unextinguishable passion for the ukulele.
Indeed, friend and producer Jeff Lynne, who worked with the former Beatle throughout the Brainwashed sessions, talked of how the project began by George playing him his new songs on the uke.
“We started working on the album in 1999,” Lynne explained on the album’s release. “George would come round my house and he’d always have a new song with him. He would strum them on a guitar or ukulele. The songs just knocked me out. George talked about how he wanted the album to sound.
"He told [George’s son] Dhani a lot of things he would like to have done to the songs and left us little clues. There was always that spiritual energy that went into the lyrics as well as the music.”
Harrison’s last solo album, Cloud Nine (1987), was an unexpected smash hit, with the single ‘Got My Mind Set On You’ bagging the number one spot on both the UK and US charts.
Brainwashed was a much earthier, more organic affair, with acoustic textures bringing George’s witty yet profoundly spiritual songs to life.
Harrison lost his battle with cancer at the age of 59 in November 2001, and Dhani and Jeff, alongside long-term friend and collaborator Jim Keltner, set to work soon after bringing the project to completion.
As with many Harrison records, themes of religion recur – ‘P2 Vatican Blues (Last Saturday Night)’ takes a wry look at Harrison’s Catholic upbringing, while the title track finds Harrison chanting to God, his mantra to the end.
Among the other highlights, ‘Marwa Blues’ showcases his distinctive slide guitar (this song was a particular favourite of Paul McCartney), while a music-hall rendition of the Great American Songbook classic ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’, complete with ukulele and tuba, is pure unbridled joy.
You can just tell how much he was enjoying himself, a fact he spoke of during the album’s sessions: ‘It’s not going to be the end – it’s going to be one of lots of records. Then I’ll go on holiday again.’
10. Johnny Cash – American V: A Hundred Highways (2006)
Towards the end of his life, Johnny Cash worked with producer Ruck Rubin on a series of increasingly fragile records that, while starkly revealing how the Man in Black was become frail where he had seemed so invincible, the tenderness and incredible emotion of his delivery meant that these American Recordings would match anything he’d done before.
The concept was simple. Record Cash singing songs he loved with simple arrangements – often just Cash on his own guitar, or backed by sympathetic musicians.
Always to the fore was his by-now gravelly voice.
American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002) was the 76th and final studio album of a career stretching back to the 1950s, and includes ‘Hurt’, a powerful retelling of the Nine Inch Nails song, which brought Cash to new audiences even as he drew his last breath.
And so it was that when the fifth instalment of these recordings was released posthumously in 2006, it became Cash’s first number one album in 37 years.
Highlights include the self-penned ‘Like The 309’, Rod McKuen’s reflective ‘Love's Been Good to Me’ (previously covered by Frank Sinatra), and, touchingly, a reworking of his own 1962 recording ‘I'm Free From The Chain Gang Now’. It was some way to bow out!
All pics Getty Images
Top pic Janis Joplin
