Band’s/groups / singer songwriter last album should have been...?

Aerosmith: Draw the Line

 

I hold that the Bee Gees could have ended with 1997's Still Waters. The final song on the album, "Smoke and Mirrors" is a great bookend for a long career. The brothers always said that they created their music by ideas that just came to them, they didn't ask for them, they didn't do anything for them to arrive, they were just there and they reached out and grabbed them. I get the sense that it was a kind of "we don't really know how or why we are good at this, but it happens and people believe it." Smoke and mirrors. And this song kind of makes me think about their journey, from young men with a dream to successful adults who built a life together. The idea that the whole thing was kind of this whole thing that just... happened. They willed it into being and it lasted for as long as they worked at it. Signing off with a song like that would have been something.

Obviously, the Gibbs had no way of knowing that This Is Where I Came In would be their last at the time of recording it, but it's a bit odd as a final album, especially with how focused on each individual brother it is. Actually ending it in 1997, when things were going so well for them made no sense at the time, but hindsight is 20/20.