It's very difficult for even the most talented music artists to consistently put out great material. Music history is filled with one-hit wonders, and even quite successful artists have released singles that flop or had hits that despite their commercial success were at best unmemorable. And for most artists their singles are their best material. In the early days of rock and roll, albums were mostly filler, artistically secondary to the singles which were the artist's most important releases. Even in later days, many artists' only really essential songs are their hits. However, for many other artists this is not at all the case. The best artists were (or are) able to produce albums where most or all the songs are excellent. In some cases, regardless of how consistent the artist's material is overall, album tracks may be superior to singles from the same album. In the 1970s, the era of album oriented rock, many artists didn't even bother with singles, a famous example being Led Zeppelin (they only released a few singles in the US, and their most famous song, "Stairway to Heaven", was never released as a single), and for many that did, singles were secondary in the same way that albums had been in the early rock and roll era had been, Pink Floyd being a good example of this. But even for artists who had mostly excellent singles that were promoted fairly heavily, such as Elton John, the Eagles or the Rolling Stones, there are examples of album tracks that are as good as or even better than many of their hit singles. I would rank Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" and the Eagles' "The Last Resort" among those artists' best five songs, but neither was a single.
I have thought about doing a series of articles on excellent album tracks by different favorite artists. A similar but slightly different approach would be to focus on songs that are genuinely obscure parts of the artist's catalogue, as songs that are technically album tracks, like the abovementioned "Stairway to Heaven", nevertheless have just as high a profile as any single release. Of course I would be more or less forced to mainly focus on artists whose catalogue I am exceptionally familiar with. There are many artists whose work I enjoy a great deal without knowing much beyond their hits, and others for whom my collection is limited to only one or two albums. This is a source of some regret, as I know that in many cases even the most comprehensive compilation can hardly do justice to the artist's career. But since both my time and my money is limited (not to mention the space I have available to keep all these albums in), there are always going to be gaps like this in both my collection and my musical knowledge. Anyway, getting back to the point, there are only a few arists for whom I could do a proper review of their album tracks, B sides, or otherwise less well known material. One obvious example is the Beatles. But in their case the sheer volume of good songs becomes an issue. If we're talking about the early albums, the problem is less pronounced. For instance, on the first album, Please Please Me, "I Saw Her Standing There" is an obvious example of a superior album track, one that in my opinion not only outshines all the other album tracks (even the excellent cover of "Twist and Shout", though not by much) but also the single "Love Me Do", with only "Please Please Me" itself being more or less its equal. A similar example on With the Beatles is "All My Loving" - though one could also argue that while this and "I Saw Her Standing There" are technically album tracks, neither is exactly obscure. In any case, while the quality of the material varied noticeably on some of the early albums, when it comes to albums like Revolver, every track is excellent, even though only two appeared as a single, and none of the songs on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were singles, making the entire album a collection of good to great album tracks. While I wouldn't rate all the songs on these albums or on the White Album, Abbey Road, etc. equally, it is still pretty much impossible to pick just one or two songs as outstanding album tracks.
Another possibility is the Police, though in their case they generally did a very good job picking their singles, so that there are only a few album tracks that compare with the singles from their respective albums. The same is mostly true of Sting, with a few exceptions, mostly on particularly strong albums like Ten Summoner's Tales. For Genesis, the biggest issue is that in the 1970s, they were very much an AOR band, with singles largely remaining an afterthought. It was only beginning in the 1980s (well, actually from 1978's And Then There Were Three) that there was a notable contrast between the high profile singles and the less well known album tracks. In this era there are certainly a number of prime examples of great album tracks that were the equal of or even superior to the singles, including "Dodo/Lurker", "Home By the Sea", "Silver Rainbow", "Domino", "Driving the Last Spike" and more, not to mention some excellent B-sides that never even made it onto an album. But while I may indeed write something specifically focusing on these and other frequently overlooked Genesis tracks from the latter half of their career, there are other ways of covering such material; in fact some of it is referred to in my articles on the various individual members of the band and in my reviews of the compilation R-Kive (available here and here.
Perhaps the best target for an article about excellent album tracks is Queen. They generally made very good choices for singles, and for a few albums in the mid to late 1970s they present a problem similar to that for the Beatles, i.e., most of the album tracks are also very good. Still, for many of their albums there are certainly songs that I consider to stand out even among otherwise good material on their respective albums and in some cases to even be marginally superior to the singles from the album. One prime example from late in their career is "Was It All Worth It", which is probably my favorite track on The Miracle and indeed one of the band's best songs from that period. But whether I ever get around to exploring standout album tracks by Queen or anyone else in detail, one thing all of the above examples serve to show is that if it all possible we should avoid judging any major artist solely by their singles, as many if not most of them will have at least a few less played album tracks that are equal to and sometimes better than the hits.
