Magnum Opus Dissonance / Music

Examples of Magnum Opus Dissonance in music.

---

• David Bowie's entire career is rife with this, with the songs he wrote for art generally not as well known as those he wrote for commerce (though there are exceptions: "'Heroes'" may not have been a hit when it was new but is now a candidate for his Signature Song). Among other examples:
  • The first and biggest example for him would be a little song he slapped together out of boredom... he was actually embarrassed by it. "Space Oddity", his first hit — and still popular to this day. His personal favorite songs of his, meanwhile, were included on the 2008 compilation iSelect. While "Life on Mars?" aligns well with popular consensus, the rest of the tracklist is much different, featuring songs such as "Some Are" (an obscure outtake otherwise exclusive to the 1991 reissue of Low), "Time Will Crawl" (from Never Let Me Down, an album that fans, critics, and Bowie himself otherwise loathed), and "Teenage Wildlife" (a deep cut from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)).
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is widely considered Bowie's best album by fans and critics alike. However, in a 2003 interview, Bowie instead said that his favorite album of his was The Buddha of Suburbia, an obscure release that was mis-marketed as a soundtrack album before being quickly removed from print due to low sales.
  • To this day, "Under Pressure" is one of his most popular songs/collaborations, both for himself and Queen. But he was reportedly dissatisfied with much of his work on Hot Space itself, requesting that many of his contributions be removed.
• Elvis Presley was the undisputed King of Rock. But he never wanted to be. He wanted to be a Gospel Music singer. His heroes growing up were people like Jake Hess, James Blackwood or JD Sumner, names you've probably never heard of. Before he was anybody, he auditioned to sing with a southern gospel quartet, but was told to stick to driving trucks because "you can't sing a lick." This is likely what led Elvis to sing whatever songs would get people to listen, and thus he became the Elvis that everyone knew. Once his career had reached such heights that he could do whatever he wanted, he began recording albums like Peace in the Valley, His Hand in Mine, How Great Thou Art and He Touched Me. He also began touring with southern gospel quartets, including JD Sumner and the Stamps, the Imperials (no, not Little Anthony's group) and the Jordanaires. He considered his gospel albums to be the greatest thing he'd ever done, as opposed to "Hound Dog", "Love Me Tender", "All Shook Up" or "Jailhouse Rock". It's doubtful most Elvis fans think the same. (Though the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences did; all of Elvis' competitive Grammy wins came in the Gospel category.) Similarly, the world heralded Elvis as "The King of Rock 'n' Roll" or just "The King". As far as Elvis was concerned, "The King" was Jesus and "The King of Rock 'n' Roll" was Fats Domino, and he resented the fact that he was more popular than Domino just because he was white.
• Warrant's "Cherry Pie", written in about twenty minutes at the request of the producer who didn't think the album they'd recorded had a radio hit. This joke song worked far better than intended, overshadowing their other work to the point that many people think it was actually recorded by Poison.
• The title song on Black Sabbath's second album (released in 1970) was originally going to be "War Pigs," but their US label Warner (Bros.) Records informed the band that an anti-Vietnam War song would not be well-received as a pop hit. In response, Sabbath cranked out "Paranoid" in only five minutes. And what became of this song? Not only was the entire album renamed after it, not only did said album become their most successful of all, but the song became one of Black Sabbath's highest-charting hits!
• Van Morrison does not consider "Brown-Eyed Girl" to be among his best songs. Most people feel differently, although critics tend to prefer material from albums like Moondance and Astral Weeks. Morrison didn't particularly like the latter album, either (although he later warmed enough to it to have performed it live in its entirety).
• The Hollies' recording of Graham Nash's big Sgt. Pepper-style production, "King Midas in Reverse", only made it to #18 on the UK Singles Chart, a disappointment for a band usually found in the top ten. Their next single, "Jennifer Eccles", a lightweight pop number they pretty much wrote as a joke, became a huge hit. Nash wasn't pleased.
  • According to interviews, this kept on happening, with the band alternating between flops they put their heart and soul into, and Silly Love Songs dashed off in five minutes that became big hits. Needless to say, this wasn't encouraging to the band.
• Gustav Holst's The Planets is the most popular of his works. However, Holst himself did not count it as one of his best and was disillusioned by this composition's popularity overshadowing his other works. It reached the point that he expressed no interest in composing a movement for Pluto when it was discovered in 1930. Further, Holst's favorite movement of The Planets was "Saturn", but it's usually "Mars" or "Jupiter" that are the most popular with audiences. Holst himself thought that "Edgon Heath", a tone poem and homage to Thomas Hardy, was his best work, a sentiment shared by Ralph Vaughan Williams and others.
• Rivers Cuomo of Weezer stated for a long time that he was embarrassed by Pinkerton, which was originally a commercial and critical flop and is now considered to be one of the band's finest moments. However, as with Morrison and Astral Weeks, he warmed up to it in later years.
• Guns N' Roses created "Sweet Child o' Mine" from Appetite for Destruction as just a song to fill space on the album; it wasn't expected to do particularly well. Now, it's acclaimed as the band's Signature Song alongside "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City", the album's two other major hits. "Sweet Child o' Mine" is particularly considered to be the defining song by Slash, who mindlessly came up with the main guitar riff as he was warming up, and the rest of the band thought it was so good they had to build a song around it.
  • The song was so popular that despite Slash publicly saying he hates its hit status (although he otherwise likes it), he still played it every night on his solo tours, simply because people wanted to hear it.
  • When the main riff of "Sweet Child o' Mine" was voted as the 8th-best guitar riff of all time, Slash also commented that "Sweet Child o' Mine" shouldn't even be on the list, and other Guns N' Roses songs would be better qualified. Clearly, the public disagrees.
• At one point, Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple has stated he never thought very highly of the song "Burn", claiming that he found the "Couldn't believe she was Devil's Sperm"-line disturbing, and that he liked "Stormbringer" a lot more. The fans, however, generally rate "Burn" as one of Deep Purple's best songs, while the entire Stormbringer album is more or less ignored, with "Soldier of Fortune" being the main exception.
  • Nobody in the band seems to hold a particularly high opinion of the legendary "Smoke on the Water", with guitarist Ritchie Blackmore in particular considering it So Okay, It's Average.
• Kurt Cobain of Nirvana didn't think much of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", describing it as "my attempt at writing a Pixies song." In fact, he didn't like Nevermind in general, thinking the whole album sounded too polished. One exception, however, was "Drain You", which he always thought was one of Nirvana's best songs, and couldn't understand why it was never the hit he thought it should have been.
• Scott Joplin had a good career writing light ragtime and other entertainment tunes, and enjoyed far more popularity than would have been expected for a black man in Reconstruction-era Texas, However, Joplin yearned to be taken seriously as a composer, which, at this time, meant writing romantic operas, so he did. Two of them. However, both flopped spectacularly and were forgotten for decades, until Treemonisha was rediscovered and staged in The '70s.
• Arthur Sullivan would have preferred to be famous for his serious music, like "The Golden Legend", a cantata based on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem of the same name; "The Martyr of Antioch", an oratorio about the martyrdom of St. Margaret of Antioch; and Ivanhoe, a grand opera based on the Walter Scott novel of the same name; rather than the comic operas he wrote with W. S. Gilbert.
• Camille Saint-Saëns did not allow The Carnival of the Animals to be published in his lifetime because he feared it would overshadow his other work (which he considered superior). To this day most people know him for "The Carnival of the Animals" and "Danse Macabre", another small atmospheric lightweight piece. He considered his magnum opus and the culmination of all his orchestral technique to be his Symphony No.3.
• The Turtles wanted to move on from their hits and create Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band/The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society type works, but the record company insisted on more hit singles in the vein of "Happy Together". Their response was "Elenore", a deliberately lightweight pastiche of their earlier works intended as a Take That!, which inevitably went on to become a hit. Their later albums, including one produced by Ray Davies, tend to be overlooked.
• While Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band would become renowned as one of the best and most important rock albums ever, the members of The Beatles themselves were divided on the issue; certainly, George Harrison and John Lennon, while not exactly disliking it, later admitted they couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Lennon himself preferred The White Album — which, while also well-acclaimed, tends to be the subject of more criticism due to its disparate sound and length. For his part, Ringo Starr mainly remembers the sessions as him not having much to do since many of the songs didn't require him to drum on them. Paul McCartney views the album quite fondly (perhaps because he was the driving force behind it).
• During the production of their third album Silver Side Up, Canadian rock band Nickelback (who were previously known for their alternative-rock sound) crafted another album of hard-hitting songs that they believed would finally bring them mainstream success. However, they also cranked out a song in twenty minutes on a lark to fill out the album's running time. That song, "How You Remind Me", became the group's biggest hit, and came to define their musical output since then. It's also been used by critics to show how the band was a musical punchline in the rock world (although not to the extent of their later songs).
• When The Who were in the process of recording Tommy, Pete Townshend slapped together a Power Pop song with no real relation to the story in order to get the attention of New York Times music critic Nik Cohn, who was known to be a fan of certain arcade novelties. That song was "Pinball Wizard", which easily became the most recognizable song on the album. And while Tommy came to be considered The Who's finest work to date, Townshend's aspirations were pegged on its ambitious follow-up, Lifehouse - which ultimately fell apart due to miscommunication and the Who parting ways with their manager, and stayed dead until Townshend revived it as a solo album and radio play nearly 30 years later, by which time his work was no longer receiving notice on the pop charts. (The album which resulted of the failed Lifehouse sessions, Who's Next, competes with Tommy as the band's most acclaimed.)
• Lou Reed's followup to the hit album Transformer was Berlin - a Darker and Edgier Concept Album about drug use, depression, abuse, and suicide. He considered it his masterpiece. It flopped. He followed that up with the poppy, lightweight Sally Can't Dance which was a hit, and then acknowledged the trope and commented that maybe he shouldn't be on the next album at all. Cue Metal Machine Music...
• Duke Ellington believed that his Sacred Concerts, which mixed jazz and church music, were the most important thing he ever wrote. Listeners aren't so sure; critics are more likely to cite Duke's collected 1939-1942 recordings, or The Far East Suite, as his greatest work.
• While most My Chemical Romance fans consider Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge or The Black Parade to be their magnum opus, vocalist Gerard Way considers Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys as such.
  "It was our best work, my favorite album we've done, and the one I'm most proud of."
• The Sisters of Mercy's front-man, Andrew Eldritch, considers the 90s album Vision Thing to be their best. Most fans agree that their best album was the first, ironically titled First and Last and Always... after making which lead the band to a falling out and lineup overhaul.
• In many interviews, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour mentions that his favorite Floyd album was neither The Dark Side of the Moon, nor The Wall, but Wish You Were Here. Drummer Nick Mason has stated his favorite album was A Saucerful of Secrets.
• Even though Frank Zappa never named Thing-Fish his masterpiece, he often called it an essential album because of the political message. Yet to this day many Zappa fans revile it as his worst, least imaginative and most unenjoyable record ever! Even the political aspect is so far-fetched that it loses its impact because people are unable to take it seriously.
• Michael Jackson:
  • Despite Thriller's reputation as the highest-selling album of all time and the critical acclaim it receives alongside Bad (itself Jackson's attempt at outdoing Thriller), Jackson's favorite solo album of his ironically happened to be Invincible, his lowest-selling album since Off the Wall.
  • In his 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Jackson claimed he was unhappy after his famous performance of "Billie Jean" during the 1983 Motown special, solely because he was unable to keep standing on his toes after performing the moonwalk for the first time in public. Still, many people consider this show to be his crowning performance achievement.
  • Various comments Jackson made about "Heal the World" from Dangerous and "Earth Song" from HIStory: Past, Present, and Future -- Book I suggest he intended them as magnum opuses that would become international anthems. To the general public, they mean little compared to most other songs on those albums, or even the similarly-themed "Man in the Mirror" (one of the major hits from the album it's on, Bad) and "We Are the World" (a proper charity song that Jackson was one of the main collaborators of, which was successful not only in terms of commercial revenue and humanitarian funding, but also critically).
• Slayer guitarist Kerry King has claimed that he prefers God Hates Us All, an album that tends to be detested by fans, over Reign in Blood, the band's most well-known work and one of their best-received.
• Claude Debussy's opera Pelleas and Melisande was by far his longest completed work and one that he took personal pride in, though it remains one of his less popular works to this day. A few years later financial circumstances forced him to publish "Suite bergamesque," a piano piece dating back to his Old Shame period; its third movement, "Clair de lune," is one of his most famous pieces.
• Robert Plant did not believe "Stairway To Heaven" from Led Zeppelin IV was the definitive Led Zeppelin song; he believes that honor should go to "Kashmir" from Physical Graffiti (still considered one of their best-known songs). It is rumored that the fact that he would have been forced to perform "Stairway" repeatedly on tour is one reason that Zeppelin's reunion was short-lived.
• Dutch poet and singer Drs. P found his poetry to be his crowning masterpiece, but it's already clear now that he will be better remembered after death for his comedic songs.
• Maurice Ravel didn't particularly like his piece Boléro, criticizing it heavily and calling it "orchestral tissue without music" that consists of one big crescendo. He was genuinely baffled by its popularity (believing his piano concertos to be better). Most people nowadays would be hard-pressed to name or recognize anything else he wrote.
• Doris Day didn't think highly of her now most famous song, the Oscar-winning "Que Sera Sera". After she recorded the single, she proclaimed, "That's the last time you'll ever hear that song." She didn't even consider it the best of her two new songs from The Man Who Knew Too Much. Instead, she picked, "We'll Love Again", which viewers can barely hear over the rescue of Day's onscreen son.
• According to Keith Richards' autobiography, Mick Jagger looked at Exile on Main St., widely cited as the Rolling Stones' greatest work, as just another album. It also took a while for its present critical reputation to build.
• Dr. Dre:
  • The Aftermath was supposed to be his masterpiece. He spent a lot of time and effort to make an album superior to The Chronic. He even spent a lot of money making extravagant music videos to promote the album. However, the album received mostly negative reviews from critics and a huge backlash from fans for being too mainstream and pop like. This resulted in Dr. Dre not making any personal albums for a while, producing work for artists like Eminem instead. Years later, he made The Chronic 2000 which featured the song "Forgot About Dre", featuring Eminem. The song, itself, was a personal Take That! to all the fans and critics that bashed him for The Aftermath. Though it wasn't expected, the album was a surprising success, and considered the second best Dr. Dre album, behind the original The Chronic.
  • For many, outside his generation of music, the only thing they know about Dr. Dre are his headphones (Beats by Dre), which have made him more money alone then all his rap career put together.
  • Due to Eminem's pop/rock crossover appeal^note  he's white bringing him to audiences with no interest in N.W.A, there is a certain demographic that thinks of him primarily as a footnote to Eminem rather than as a legend in his own right.
• Eminem:
  • Eminem went through a phase where he refused to play "My Name Is" at shows, or would do a bit of it and then interrupt it by saying he was sick of it. He later clarified that he accepts it's a great record, but resented it as being a novelty record that eclipses his more serious, personal and experimental work - particularly "The Way I Am" - and the way it typecast him into launching every album with a novelty hit for a whole decade. He's also been critical of his technical ability on the track, saying that he hates how behind-the-beat he is on "My Name Is" and the rest of The Slim Shady LP in general.
  • "Rap God" is generally held to be the Signature Song of at least his post-overdose career, if not his high point altogether. While Eminem is proud of the song, he has stated he felt the focus it gets to be overblown, as he views it as little more than a cleaned-up freestyle that he slapped together out of a bunch of stream-of-consciousness ideas. Many sections of the song intended as parody (the speed-rap section, the "lookin' boy" part) were taken seriously by an audience who didn't get the references, and spawned a lot of Follow the Leader flow trends in hip-hop that Eminem has been critical of.
  • Eminem was unsure about Revival, but felt good enough about it to release it, believing it would please his entire audience. The album is widely considered to be his worst ever, with even his late-career defenders like Robert Christgau having little time for it. In response, Eminem released Kamikaze, a much shorter, angrier and rawer album made on a rapid turnaround that was mostly about yelling at critics for not liking Revival, which received a far more positive response than Revival, with even some of his harshest detractors calling it his best album since his overdose. Eminem still defends Revival as significant to him — later, he revised his opinion to say that, although he thinks several songs on the album are some of the best things he ever wrote, there were a couple of songs on it which he should not have included.
• Mike Patton has lamented the rap-metal hit "Epic" being Faith No More's Signature Song, given the band spending years building a reputation for more intense and experimental work. Fortunately for them, over time their follow-up album Angel Dust has become increasingly become considered the band's definitive work by both fans and music publications. Interestingly and ironically enough, this was the reverse case during the initial recording and release of The Real Thing, as "Epic" was considered the album's Magnum Opus at the time by the band. The record label had comparatively little confidence in the song, and it wasn't until after "From Out of Nowhere" flopped on the airwaves that "Epic" was chosen as a single. The rest is history.
• Although The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead is commonly considered their greatest album, all four members have gone on record proclaiming Strangeways, Here We Come as their masterwork.
• "A Moment Like This" the inaugural song by the first winner of American Idol, Kelly Clarkson was a big hit and had the biggest leap to number one since The Beatles. Kelly, however, hates the song, and since then refuses to sing it at her concerts.
• 80s one-hit-wonder band Quiet Riot ended up recording a remake of a silly, forgettable song, which they only recorded because their producer thought it would get their name out there, and then they could follow that up with their original material which they considered to be far superior. That one hit in question? "Cum On Feel the Noize" (originally by Slade).
• The operetta Eileen was a flop, though it was Victor Herbert's personal favorite of his works.
• While he never hated the song, Rod Stewart never fully understood the appeal of "Maggie May", which he initially released as a B-side track, but ended up getting a lot of radio play.
• Jim Kerr of Simple Minds has mentioned that he likes their album Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call more than its follow up, the widely considered magnum opus New Gold Dream. In fairness, so do many fans. The two albums are quite similar in style - the basic difference is that New Gold Dream is a shorter, more refined album with more hits on it, whereas SAF/SFC is a double album with an epic quality.
• Rush fans tend to think that Moving Pictures or 2112 is the band's greatest. Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist, considered Clockwork Angels to be their finest. (Some fans agree, though the majority still prefer the earlier works.)
• Sammy Davis Jr. hated his Signature Song "The Candy Man". He sang the "Timmy-two-shoes, white bread" song in one sanctimonious, condescending take - you can actually hear him forcing a smile. Upon hearing the playback, he swore the song would drag him and his whole career into the sewer. Whereas Sammy's first big-budget record under the Motown label bombed (leading them to shelve the second), "The Candy Man" spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in 1972.
• Louis Armstrong felt he was a much better trumpet player later in his career than compared to the improv pieces that can be heard on his The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings albums. All his admirers would disagree, cherishing those 1920s recordings over his arguably much better playing in the last decades of his life.
• KISS vocalist/guitarist Paul Stanley often cites "Love Gun" as the best song he's ever written. While "Love Gun" is certainly well known (you're almost guaranteed to hear it at a Kiss concert), "Rock and Roll All Nite" and "Shout It Out Loud" are infinitely more famous (you'll definitely hear them at any Kiss concert). Ironically, the album "Love Gun" is on (called, appropriately enough, Love Gun) did a lot better in sales than either Dressed to Kill or Destroyer, the albums that featured "Rock and Roll All Nite" and "Shout It Out Loud", respectively.
• Being their most well-known one, the Foo Fighters' second studio album, The Colour and the Shape, is usually considered to be the band's best work. However, the band members are critical of it, feeling they've got a lot better since then, but critics take no notice of that. This is illustrated in Nate Mendel's comments in the liner notes of the album's 10th Anniversary Edition.
• Pop singer Lady Gaga considers her 2013 album ARTPOP to be her best work, but a decent number of fans consider either Born This Way or The Fame/The Fame Monster her best album(s). While certainly not a hated album, and it still sold well, ARTPOP is seen by some more mainstream outlets as where Gaga began to decline in popularity among the mainstream pop music audience despite being quite huge just years prior.
• "Sleeping Sun", one of best-known songs by the band Nightwish, and a highly successful single, was reluctantly composed by the band's keyboard player, Tuomas Holopainen, after the band's manager suggested he'd write a formulaic, short, catchy ballad to commemorate the European total eclipse of the summer of 1999, in order to boost the sales of the album they've just released (Oceanborn; in fact, that song wasn't even originally in the album, but was added for its reissue). Holopainen said he was against the idea and afterward told the manager not to ask him for one single song ever again.
• Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor (Moonlight) was hugely popular in its day and is still an instantly recognizable piano piece. Ludwig himself though couldn't understand all the fuss. He reportedly said to his student, Carl Czerny, "Surely I've written better stuff than this."
• Tom Lehrer, who rose to fame as something of a countercultural icon in The '60s as a singer, pianist and writer of darkly humorous songs, was, before, during, and after his musical career, employed at Harvard University as a Professor of Mathematics, and never considered his career as a singer and comedian to be anything more than a hobby.
• Billy Joel gets hit with this a lot. His Signature Song is "Piano Man", and while he likes the lyrics, he considers the music to be repetitive. He also dislikes his only number one hit "Tell Her About It" (he refuses to play it in concert). He considers "Vienna", "She's Right on Time", "You May Be Right", "And So It Goes" and "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" to be better songs. Arguably, the work he poured most of his heart and soul into was "The Downeaster Alexa," given that he spent years of his life in the line of work portrayed in the song.
  • Then, while his most critically acclaimed and most popular album among audiences is The Stranger, the album he's the most proud of indeed is The Nylon Curtain.
• Soundgarden's biggest hit, "Black Hole Sun" was written in just fifteen minutes but went on to become their Signature Song.
• Styx: Dennis DeYoung's labor of love was Kilroy Was Here - a sentiment not shared by any other band member, which broke up shortly thereafter and reunited in 1990 - without DeYoung.
• What are the two signature songs of Evanescence? "Bring Me to Life" and "My Immortal". Singer Amy Lee has gone on record multiple times saying she doesn't particularly love the former, as it was heavily rewritten by Executive Meddling, or the latter, as it is not grounded in reality and is ex-guitarist Ben Moody's creature anyway. Songs that are much more personal to her don't get nearly as much commercial recognition, nor are so ingrained into pop culture – "Good Enough", for instance, is a similarly piano-driven ballad, inspired by her then-fiancé and current husband, but its release as a single was cancelled by the label.
• Aram Khachaturian never actually disowned the Sabre Dance, but claimed that, had he known how much it will overshadow all his other works^note not too badly, considering just the Standard Snippet page contains one more work by him, he would have never written it.
• Kanye West's 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is widely considered to be both his personal best and one of the best albums of the 21st century, but he personally considers his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak his best. He's even described MBDTF as being an "apology" record after 808s polarized critics and audiences alike at the time of its release. Funnily enough, while MBDTF is still largely considered his opus, time has been kinder to 808s based on its impact left behind developing in the soft rap/R&B sounds of The New '10s, so he might have been onto something.
• Despite Faith being his most popular and acclaimed record, George Michael revealed in his final interview before he died that he considered Older to be his greatest work, stating, "I think I wrote the best, most healing piece of music that I've ever written in my life with that album." In regards to individual songs, he stated multiple times that he never understood why everyone loved "Careless Whisper" so much, which was because he wrote the song when he was still a teenager and he believed he had written much better songs since.
• If there's one piece by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that everybody knows, it's his 1812 Overture, which has attained Standard Snippet status. However, he personally hated the piece. It was done strictly on commission and he felt no personal or artistic connection to it whatsoever. His ballet music for The Nutcracker is also very widely known and, while he didn't dislike that music, he didn't consider it his best work, either. Rather, he preferred The Sleeping Beauty and The Snow Maiden, the latter being an obscure incidental music composition based on the play of the same name.
• "Thank You for Being a Friend", the 1978 hit that became especially popular once used as the theme song for The Golden Girls, was just "a little throwaway song" that took "an hour to write" according to writer Andrew Gold. Almost nothing else in his career penetrated American pop culture quite like it (except, thanks to Memetic Mutation, the children's Halloween song "Spooky Scary Skeletons").
• Brazilian indie band Los Hermanos is best known to the public at large for "Anna Julia", the lead single of their debut album, in 1999. It was a bubblegum pop composition about an ex-girlfriend of their producer, and it became such a huge hit that even George Harrison performed on an English version recorded by Jim Capaldi. The band themselves, however, soon grew tired of being overexposed because of one song that did not reflect their style, and even though their next two albums were very praised by critics, they never got another hit like "Anna Julia" again - not that they care, considering how the song was excised from their live setlists not long after its heyday passed.
• Radiohead became big off the back of the hit single "Creep", which they either detested at the time they were recording it, or grew to detest through overexposure to the point that they refused to play it in concert for decades.
• Everyone has heard one piece of music by Julius Fucik, namely "Entry of the Gladiators" (That's "the Circus tune" to those too lazy to click the link). Fucik considered it an irrelevancy, and was somewhat distressed at its popularity. His favorite composition was the "Florentinermarsch". March aficionados fairly consistently vote "Florentinermarsch" one of the greatest, if not the greatest, march of all time, but the number of people who would recognize it if they heard it is negligible compared to "Entry".
• While "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is popular and reached memetic status in the modern day, Edvard Grieg referred to it as "something that I literally can't bear listening to".
• Annie Lennox has said how proud she is of Eurythmics soundtrack to the movie adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, For the Love of Big Brother. Most fans and critics either consider it a throwaway Creator's Oddball, or simply overlook its existence entirely.
• Queen:
  • While they certainly agree that it's a very important album for them, the members themselves don't think A Night at the Opera was their best album ever; Brian May personally believes Queen II and Made in Heaven were their finest works.
  • "Bohemian Rhapsody" is usually recognized by listeners and critics as the band's Signature Song and Freddie Mercury's greatest, but Freddie was actually more proud of "Somebody to Love", which he considered his favorite Queen song.
• Bruce Springsteen generally downplays this, since "Born to Run" and "Thunder Road" are two of the songs he loves the most, very popular among audiences and are also generally his two most critically acclaimed songs. However, while the audience is easily more oriented towards the big hits from Born in the USA (the Title Track, "Dancing in the Dark", "I'm on Fire", "Glory Days"), or other popular ones such as "Streets of Philadelphia", "Hungry Heart", "The River", "Tougher Than the Rest"... Well, Bruce mentioned among his top 5 songs "The Rising", "Nebraska" and "Racing in the Street". They are reasonably popular, sure, but none of them would qualify as Springsteen's Signature Song (though, to be honest, "The Rising" is arguably Springsteen's most defining song of the Noughties).
  • "Secret Garden" is a popular hit which Springsteen almost never played live.
• Daft Punk consider Human After All to be their best album. Quite a few fans disagree, as they find many of the album's tracks as overly repetitive and having little substance outside of a few cuts.
• R.E.M.: R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe said his favorite album is New Adventures in Hi-Fi, later changing his answer to Reveal in 2021. Many fans, however, tend to pick either Automatic for the People, Lifes Rich Pageant, Document, or Murmur as the best R.E.M. album.
• The Replacements' bassist Tommy Stinson was interviewed by Vice for their "Rank Your Records" series, and stated that his favorite Replacements album is their last one, All Shook Down. Most fans, however, do not count All Shook Down as a Replacements record, since the album was originally intended to be a Paul Westerberg solo album until his management convinced him to make it a Replacements album. Fans instead usually consider Let It Be or Tim to be their finest works.
• Samuel Adler is a composer who has published over 400 songs and compositions, but his most well-known work is the "We give thanks to God for bread" song heard at Jewish summer camps.
• Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis was interviewed as part of the aforementioned "Rank Your Records" series, and while his favorite Dinosaur Jr. album is You're Living All Over Me, which most critics and fans would agree with, his second favorite (and favorite out of their major label albums) is Hand It Over; the latter album sold poorly, had mixed critical reception, and was generally dismissed by fans due to being the final release of an era of the band where Mascis was largely playing all the instruments himself.

---