…A spokesperson for Axl Rose claim completion of Chinese Democracy is in the offing. Avid Guns n’ Roses fans will say “how many times have we heard this before?”
Mr. Rose is reportedly working on the album even now in a San Fernando Valley studio. “The ‘Chinese Democracy’ album is very close to being completed,” Merck Mercuriadis, the chief executive officer of Sanctuary Group, which manages Mr. Rose, wrote in a recent statement. He added that other artists including Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder “have throughout their careers consistently taken similar periods of time without undeserved scrutiny as the world respects that this is what it can sometimes take to make great art.” There’s certainly more than enough material; as Mr. Zutaut says, even years ago “people felt like the record had been made four or five times already.” But of course, rumors of the album’s imminent release have circulated since almost the very beginning of the tale, more than a decade ago.
And at the center of that tale, now as then, is the confounding figure of Axl Rose himself. A magnetic talent, a moody unpredictable artist, a man of enormous ideas and confused follow-through, he has proven himself to be an uncontrollable variable in any business plan.
Update: I think the quintessential example of long time between albums artists is Donald Fagen – 11 years from The Nightfly to Kamakiriad. Another seven to Two Against Nature. Gabriel and Wonder both have long stretches between releases. But they were still quite active in collaborative efforts, production, etc..
