10 Perfect Posthumous Rock Albums
The Final Bows.
It's always strange whenever an artist has to confront their own mortality. After having to build their legacy for as long as they have, it gets a little more complicated having to analyze someone's work after they have passed away. It's not about how they died though. These are more of a celebration of how they lived their life.
On each one of these albums, you get a sense of seeing the artist as people more than just someone who played songs that you thought were catchy. Whether it's the way they sang or the state they were in when they actually made these records, hearing their voice in this light makes these people feel a lot more relatable than the untouchable rock stars that you knew about.
Then again, it's hard not to listen to these records and not feel just a little bit sad. After all, this is how it ends, and there's no real way around it when the writer is no longer here to say anything on the matter. That doesn't mean that we have to look at all of these records in a negative light. Since these bands were all about enriching our lives through the power of music, it's best that we take their cues and enjoy these records as much as we can.
10. Milk and Honey - John Lennon
There are only a handful of deaths in the music world where it truly felt like the world stopped. Since these are people who provided the soundtracks for our lives, you can pretty much pinpoint where you were when you heard that they had passed. Though people like Michael Jackson and Dimebag Darrell were gods of their respective genres, losing John Lennon felt like losing a family member.
After being gunned down outside of his apartment building in 1980, it stung that much more when we heard Double Fantasy. Refreshed from embracing home life, it looked like John was about to come into his own with his new record, only to have his life be cut short before he could start. That didn't mean that he had stopped working once he put his final record out, with Milk and Honey arriving a few years later.
Much like Double Fantasy, this is a trade off cycle of songs between him and Yoko Ono, as they both bask in the bliss of being in love and having no cares in the world on songs like Borrowed Time and Nobody Told Me. There were even enough songs left over to complete some tracks for the Beatles Anthology over a decade later like Real Love. Even though this next decade was a bit different for John, the Intellectual Beatle sounded like he was ready to roll with the times.