Personally, I have no expectations of him. LOTL put paid to any I had remaining.
He is not standing his ground if there is nothing left to stand on. He could very easily make his songs and albums readily available to his fans in a myriad of ways yet obtusely continues to believe in the dying paradigm of the Big Record Company Contract. In this day and age, an artist/band with minimal commercial clout (say, one with a record that has sold less than ~20K copies in the US since release over a year ago) is not going to have record executives bending over backwards to offer him a contract. His public trash talk of Steve Barnett certainly did him no additional favors. He has not positioned himself to get a contract where he dictates all the terms. Just "being Morrissey" alone is not enough anymore. That is where self-release should enter the picture for his consideration. He is not saying it aloud but it is readily implied that he doesn't want to do the footwork. He plays the martyr when, in reality, it is the Art and his die-hard faithful who suffer in the process. If his Art were so important to him - and something he feels the world should hear - Morrissey should be falling over himself to get it out in the public view. Detritus provided an estimable precis as to how that can be a lucrative venture for him. That he continues to disregard this as an avenue shows a stunning paucity of imagination.
You see no burnt bridges because they have all been reduced to ash already. You are well-equipped with inappropriately-deployed ellipses and inane paraphrasing of lyrics, but blind to the bigger picture. There will be NO new Morrissey record, good or bad, if he doesn't reconsider the landscape of the music business as it is in the 21st century.
