I personally enjoy following the artist's journey and watching the growth.

If you started out as a teeny-pop singer and then you matured into a soul man and then got into rock and then as you get older you start playing jazz... that's great.

What I don't like is the backtracking and the "that wasn't really me" stuff. That kind of hard course-correction feels unsure to me. And I think that a lot of people (or me, at least) admire confidence in our artists just like we do in our leaders.

If you start of playing soul and then you go on to play rock, that's okay. But when you step back and start talking about how you were never really into the soul stuff... It almost feels like a slap in the face of those who liked your soul records.

*shrug* That's how I kinda feel about it anyway.

In Van's case, you could argue that he was organically gravitating towards rock for the past couple of albums anyway... but I'm referring to the statements he's made defending it. It makes the audience feel like he was running a scam on them before all that time they were supporting him as the kind of artist he was selling himself as. And that's why I think there's that disconnect that SoWhat spoke about.