Tesla albums, ranked

Tesla's best record. Not the most successful, for sure. In fact, it only went gold, and it killed their career for a while. But that was because it was released in 1994, into the heart of the grunge fad. Release this album in 1989 and it sells 5 million copies. However, trying to swim against the tide of pop culture is never easy, and a gold album and record company-induced exit from recording was probably the best they could hope for in 1994.

It's a shame, because Shine Away, Try So Hard and others on this record master the art of mixing acoustic passages into hard rock songs, and while the songs overall keep a toe in hard rock, their classic rock influences really shine through on many of these songs. The album ends with a cover of *Games People Play," which makes that classic early 70s tune sound like something they wrote in the late 80s.

Tesla's 2nd best album. Not only does it contain Tesla staples such as Freedom Slaves, What You Give, and Song and Emotion, the arguably heaviest song on the record is about Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

Their second album, which builds on Mechanical Resonance, mixes the expected straight-ahead rockers with some unexpected gems. Love Song and The Way It Is showcase an acoustic/power ballad side of the band that wasn't there in the debut. This was a candidate to be my choice for their best record, but it fell just short.

The debut album. It contains three tunes that are Tesla essentials in my opinion. Little Suzi, which is a cover, but I was in my 40s before I knew that. The original is so obscure and so bad that the Tesla version is canonical, IMO. The album produced their breakout song, Modern Day Cowboy, and a killer power ballad, Love Me.

A fascinating thing about this record is that all the best songs were on side 2. Side 1 is fine, but they are all straight-ahead hard rock tunes. Side 2 is much more interesting and, ultimately, foreshadowed the direction the band would go.

I intended to keep this list to only studio albums. However, this record is iconic and also spawned a Top 10 hit that may have kicked off the entire acoustic rock trend of the 90s. I believe they were the first band of the era to have an acoustic hit. Also, they cover The Grateful Dead, and do you think Poison could have pulled that off?

Released in 2019, we have assume that this is the last full studio album that we are getting from Tesla. Produced by Def Leppard's Phil Collen, it suffered from criticism among some corners of the Tesla world that it sounded too much like Def Leppard.

I am not convinced that's fair. Yes, the Def Lep influences are unmistakably there. But California Summer Song is as pop as anything Tesla has ever recorded, but not in a Def Lep way. I'm not even sure where to place it. Everclear maybe?

Anyway, if this is their swan song, they went out in style.

After the somewhat pedestrian effort of Forever More, Simplicity reminds us that Tesla is a superb rock and roll band. Cross My Heart is a standout, a bluesy, piano-laced ode of fidelity from the road to a loved one back home. It's a song that if released in a different era, ends up in Casey Kasem's Top 10.

10 years after their best album, released in the midst of the grunge thing, Tesla dropped a new studio album that was precisely what any Tesla fan would want. Caught Up in a Dream ranks with the best of their ballads, and rockers like *Into the Now"*and Miles Away prove the band lost nothing in the 10 year break.

They could have played it safe here and done all their power ballads acoustically. Instead they featured some of their heaviest tunes, giving Edison's Medicine a new perspective as an acoustic tune. There are also a couple of previously unreleased tracks and a cover of the 70s tune.

Forever More is notable for its lack of notable songs. It's not a bad record, but nothing jumps out at you. It's a solid collection of Tesla tunes, which at this stage of their career, when almost all their 80s contemporaries have stopped even trying to create new art, is still a pretty good deal.