10 Music Side Projects Better Than The Main Band

Not every musician is meant to play the same kind of music until the day they die. Although having a good amount of fans to fall back on with your classic style is usually a good sign, you're going to want to test the waters and explore some new parts of your sound that you didn't think were possible.

While you might not associate these songs with the same name, each of these musicians are actually pretty decent behind a different genre as well.

Whether it was a pure bait and switch or just a jam session amongst friends, all of these records held up as something special aside from the fact that they had just one famous person in it.

Once the star power of everything wore off, these guys had the tunes to back themselves up, with bodies of work that still hold up as something special even years after they've abandoned the project.

Don't expect for all of these to last though, since a lot of the projects were meant to be experiments or else can't be reproduced because of everyone's conflicting schedules. Then again, it's nice that we at least had these nuggets of brilliance once than to not have them at all, right?

As hair metal really started to come into its own, you knew you were never in for something too deep with Motley Crue. Although songs like Live Wire and Wild Side are classics from this era of the Sunset Strip, this is the type of debauchery that made a lot more sense back when the whips and chains looked like a decent fashion statement.

A funny thing happened when Nikki Sixx cleaned up his act, though.

While the Crue were in between different album cycles, Sixx: AM was a pretty decent modern rock outfit for Sixx to try on, originally brought together to make an album companion piece to his memoir the Heroin Diaries.

Once he knew what he had on his hands though, they have been going strong ever since, with DJ Ashba holding up as an exceptional guitar player in moments.

And let's face it...James Michael has a hell of a lot more range to his delivery than Vince Neil ever could, which makes most of these songs sound gargantuan compared to the forgettable songs from Shout at the Devil and Girls Girls Girls.

For a band that was never about being mature, it's nice to see that Sixx had the ability to grow the hell up on the musical side as well. Hell, most people his age only wish their their newer stuff sounded this good.