It’s one thing to record outside of a famous band, it’s quite another to attempt a solo album when your band is groundbreaking, influential, iconic, all the adjectives used to describe the best of the best.
However, the artists below made touchstone albums without their famous bands. Each of their groups—The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, and Radiohead—changed music in profound ways.
How to explain the criteria for “best.” First, the originating bands had to be culture-shifting. Both The Beatles and Radiohead redefined the very notion of a rock band. And The Velvet Underground planted the seeds for punk and glam rock, and consequentially post-punk and new wave.
So, kick out the jams from these legends gone solo.
The Eraser by Thom Yorke (2006)
Radiohead took time off following their 2003 album Hail to the Thief. During the hiatus, Thom Yorke began recording his first solo album. He worked with longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, and free from the creative restraints of reaching a consensus with bandmates, Yorke created an album without friction.
Yorke and Godrich arranged pieces of music from a library of samples, some taken from previous Radiohead songs. The music is skittering and glitchy but Yorke’s vocals are dry and soulful. It’s less dense than a Radiohead album. Yorke had long ago abandoned writing traditional songs, but The Eraser sounds (almost) straightforward. The songs are immediate, direct, isolated, and full of political anxiety. If Radiohead is a post-rock beast, Yorke is the heart and soul.
Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings (1973)
Critics hated Paul McCartney’s early solo albums. Perhaps unfairly but understandably reviewed against The Beatles, the albums have aged better than the contemporary reviews. McCartney I, at least, is objectively great, and “Maybe I’m Amazed” is as good as anything he’d written in The Beatles.
Still, Band on the Run hushed the critics. It’s a masterpiece and though it’s a Wings album, McCartney played and sang nearly everything. The title track began with something George Harrison had said during a business meeting. McCartney turned his mate’s comment, “If we ever get out of here,” into a trilogy. After 51 years, Band on the Run is still McCartney’s most consequential post-Beatles album.
Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon (1970)
John Lennon’s debut solo album resulted from the primal scream therapy he underwent at the time. His voice is raw and exposed and the opening song “Mother” is the desperate plea of a child raging against abandonment. Lennon had traded in psychedelia and experimentalism for deeply personal confessionals and the album’s sparse production exposes the pain bubbling underneath one of the world’s biggest rock stars.
He also sings about class exploitation in one of the great protest anthems in rock and roll, “Working Class Hero.” Tape operator Andy Stephens claimed Lennon recorded the song 100 times before he was happy and the final version is a composite of two takes. John Harris, writing for Mojo, called Plastic Ono Band among “the trilogy of truly essential post-Beatles solo albums,” with All Things Must Pass and Band on the Run.
Transformer by Lou Reed (1972)
After quitting The Velvet Underground, it took one self-titled solo album for Lou Reed to find his footing. There were good songs on Lou Reed but it didn’t match the power of his former band. Glam rock had emerged in Britain and Reed noticed the result of bands that formed because of The Velvet Underground. He saw the light.
Working with David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Reed made his solo masterpiece. Transformer features two of Reed’s defining songs, “Perfect Day” and the accidental hit “Walk on the Wild Side.” With The Velvet Underground, Reed’s pop instincts existed beneath the avant-garde production. On Transformer, Reed, eternally cool and iconic, made a perfectly weird and timeless glam rock gem. It’s the spiritual cousin to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, an album Bowie couldn’t have made without Lou Reed’s influence.
All Things Must Pass by George Harrison (1970)
Writing songs for The Beatles, alongside Lennon and McCartney, proved to be a struggle for George Harrison. But All Things Must Pass might be the strongest post-Beatles solo album. He’d been hanging around with Bob Dylan and The Band, as well as Eric Clapton and various musicians from Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, all of whom, directly or indirectly, shaped the album.
Harrison had finally put into focus the earthy and spiritual vistas that formed his worldview. Working as his own man, Harrison sounds confident and free from being part of the greatest band the world’s ever seen. He also established his blissful slide guitar playing, as smooth and gentle as his voice. No longer limited to his “quota of one or two tunes per [Beatles] album,” Harrison’s new freedom resulted in a vivid portrait of solitude expanded into a sprawling and brilliant triple album.
