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* "made me wonder just what happens next..."

As Grant and I debate amongst ourselves -- sometimes in our respective hovels on this site -- the pros and cons of the music-marketplace transition from physical disc to digital byte, one of the more prominent topics is the potential shift of focus from albums to songs. In essence, it's a doubling-back to pre-1960s days, when the single was a greater driving force than the album, both commercially and creatively. Grant remains steadfastly committed to the album aesthetic. I'm much less so, for a couple of reasons.

First, and most primal for me, is that my initial grounding in music was 1970s AM pop radio, an era that was rife with one-hit wonders -- and viably so. You really didn't need an album's worth of comparative material from the likes of, say, Looking Glass, Edison Lighthouse, or the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose to appreciate the immediate pop transcendence of "Brandy (You're A Fine Girl)", "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Grows" and "It's Too Late To Turn Back Now", respectively.

Second, and a more contemporary point, is that I believe there is a rather limited pool of artists who deserve to be heard at album-length. It's extraordinarily common nowadays to put on a CD and hear maybe a couple good ideas accompanied by about a dozen textbook examples of entirely unnecessary and uninspiring filler. This has, of course, only gotten worse through the stretching of album lengths from the more common 45 minutes of the LP's heyday to the increasingly excruciating 60-70 minutes of many CDs. As such, I find it very liberating that online downloading allows the consumer to purchase only those couple or three tracks which were good enough to release, and leave the rest of the garbage on the checkout counter.

If you still want the whole album, of course, you're still free to buy it in that form. My hope, however, is that an increasing consumer trend toward purchasing songs rather than albums will force artists to focus more on the sanctity of the song, as an artistic entity unto itself. There is potential, as I see it, for internet commerce to actually improve the quality of the song form, from both a writing and a recording standpoint.

All that said, however, I don't want to come across as someone who can't appreciate the proper artistic value of an album, when it's created and presented effectively as a suite or collection of songs (rather than just a way to squeeze as much content onto a 74-minute CD as possible). I can scarcely imagine my own personal musical journey without signposts such as Jackson Browne's The Pretender, or Rickie Lee Jones' Pirates, or John Hiatt's Bring The Family, or Son Volt's Trace, or Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator), to name just a handful of works from different eras that work just about perfectly as albums, in the fullest and truest musical sense of the word.

A chance conversation with an ND subscriber on the ferry a couple days ago got me thinking about that again. But the next morning I was spurred, while listening to the Avett Brothers' upcoming album Emotionalism, to look at the subject from a slightly different angle: sequencing.

As I see it, a good deal of an album's ultimate impact comes down to sequencing. That can include not only the order in which the songs are presented, but also what songs might have been best removed altogether. (It could also include the possibility of certain songs being added to the final sequence; but of course the listener rarely knows about those leftovers, unless/until a box set or "expanded version" is released later with bonus tracks.)

Rarely will sequencing determine whether an album is fundamentally "good" or "not good," of course. You gotta have the songs, first and foremost, to justify making a whole album to begin with; otherwise, you're better served to just record a couple of singles or a brief EP, and release them digitally as such. (Which is, happily, quite feasible these days -- another benefit of the internet-downloading age.)

Once you've assembled enough quality work to legitimately justify an album, however, sequencing can make the difference between whether an album comes across as "good" or "great." It's those little tweaks among the groupings and segues that can change the tone or even the meaning of an album. Sometimes it's a matter of arranging the songs so that they properly convey the "story" of an overarching theme; other times it's simply a matter of getting the mood right as one song blends into the next, and then the next. When it's done right, as I expect we all can attest from our personal experiences, the expressive effect is magic.

Matthew Sweet's 1991 album Girlfriend is an example of a record that I always thought ascended from good to great based largely upon the sequencing. The songs themselves assured that Sweet had a solid and successful pop record on his hands; but the way he constructed an arc in their progression -- from exhilarating discovery to difficult dissolution and finally to reflective acceptance -- gave Girlfriend an almost cinematic quality. It's no wonder the album still stands as his career artistic and commercial zenith, more than fifteen years later.

A more recent experience with the effects of sequencing that sticks out in my mind is Thad Cockrell's 2003 disc Warmth & Beauty. This situation was a little unusual in that I'd heard an early advance of the tracks, before the album was actually sequenced; as such, I decided to assemble the songs in an order that followed what I believed to be a sort of dramatic development lurking within the material. (Looking back through my files from four years ago now, I notice that I actually went so far as to write a four-paragraph "narrative" that outlined the progression I heard.)

Utlimately Cockrell chose a different sequence. (One thing very much to his credit, by the way, is that he was determined not to follow the trend of making CDs contain 14-15 tracks and run for an hour or more. The records that had affected him the most in his formative years almost always contained ten songs, and he was steadfast about sticking to that number, though the final version of Warmth & Beauty ended up just barely over that, with eleven tracks.) The funny thing for me is that when I go back and listen to that record now, I still listen to it in the sequence I'd created. To me, the sequence significantly affected the way I heard the album. What was released in the stores really was different, as I heard it -- even though it had all the same songs.

Which, I suppose, is another advantage of modern technology. Nowadays, once you've downloaded all the tracks on an album, you can very easily listen to them in whatever order you wish. If you think there's a logic or a feeling in a sequence that differs from how the tracks might have been presented in CD form, you're welcome to create your own impression of how the album might unfold.

Which brings me to the album that got me started writing this whole discourse. I'm listening this morning to an advance of the Avett Brothers' Emotionalism, which comes out May 15 on Ramseur Records. You'll find plenty more of my words about them in our May-June issue of No Depression that should be hitting stands and mailboxes any day now. It goes without saying that I think Emotionalism is a pretty special record, or I wouldn't have taken the time to write at length about them in our pages.

The Avetts in the past have been guilty of releasing CDs that were not albums in the finest sense. Last year's Four Thieves Gone clocked in at 73:52 for its 17 tracks; even accounting for the fact that the final track was 16 minutes of largely silence and garbage studio/party chatter (a whole 'nother problem for a different discussion), that's still 58 minutes for the other 16 tracks. Its predecessor, Mignonette, was even more frustrating, largely because it did in fact contain quite a few first-rate songs. But the band couldn't leave well enough alone; at 20 songs and 73 minutes, it's just too long for its own good, with not one but two hidden tracks trailing after a tune so definitively conclusive that it should not have been followed by anything.

On Emotionalism, they've finally made a real album. At 59 minutes and 14 tracks, it's still teetering a tad toward the too-long side; but it's hard to fault them much because of the quality of the material from start to finish. I've experimented with trimming a couple of cuts, and did find a way that gets it down to 12 songs and 50 minutes, which perhaps makes the record slightly easier to digest as a whole. That said, both of the songs I removed are unquestionably very strong numbers. I wouldn't cut anything here for not being up to snuff, but simply to hone the final shape of the album itself. If they were to have left any songs off, they most certainly would have used them down the road in some capacity.

I also tried out a swap in placement of the #4 and #5 tracks, based mainly on my own theory that the #4 track on a record is a perfect spot for a "second single" type of pop tune, and they've slotted such a song at #5 here. This is undoubtedly more of a personal quirk on my end, but it's something I've noticed in many albums over the decades that have a very effective flow and feel.

Those are pretty minor details, ultimately -- fun to monkey around with, but in fact the Avetts sequenced Emotionalism remarkably well. The leadoff cut is perfect; the middle section radiates with the record's most creative and inventive material; and the denouement of the penultimate and final tracks is precisely as it should be. For a band that, despite all its obvious live-performance charisma, had yet to show they really knew how to make a great album, the Avetts surely turned a major corner with this one. If I had to make a list of the decade's ten best albums so far, Emotionalism would be on it.

(Address any comments to letters at no depression dot net)

adios,
peter

....The following comment was received from Scott M. Anderson on April 24:

I believe that an album is a representation and collection of ideas or songs, in an artist's life at a particular moment. It's a slice of art and life, and self expression. I don't think it was intended to be a handbook or manual. Just a reflection, in a point in time, created and consumed for all appetites. The infrastructure has changed from our record buying days to today's consumer. Instant gratification and attention spans play a significant role as well as technology. Now a day's you can hear a song anytime and access an artist through the internet, the store is always open.

I agree with you on uninspiring filler, there is too much of it. I'm reading a book right now by Benjamin Barber, called Consumed, How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole. Greed is all we're really about. There is no shame in making money, or how or from whom. When it comes to making money there are no rules or no guilty conscience. This attitude certainly spills into making album's and record companies, as well as the everyday. I think we all want our money's worth. However, ten well crafted songs, is always better than 20 songs of endless crap. It is about quality not quanity. At the end of 45 minutes of music or 80, it is about the condition of your soul. Filling the soul with feeling, understanding, passion and spirit. From the opening seconds of U2's, "Where The Street's Have No Name" from the Joshua Tree album to the closing, bitter sweet, stinging, reminder of "Learning How To Love You" from Mr. John Hiatt's Bring The Family. Well crafted albums will reflect as time pieces. We all have our own soundtracks to our souls, and enjoy making them. As you mentioned, an album comes packaged one way, technology allows you to play it your own way, and tomorrow you may want to hear it in a different way. It scares me to think what is next for music, it is as haunting to think about its future, as is the songs warning us. Hope this made some sense? Scott M. Anderson (Windsor, New York)

Posted by peter on April 24, 2007 1:12 AM | Permalink