Album Composition

[packbat]

It seems to me a pattern: albums begin well, and end weakly. The first track on the Beatles' Abbey Road is "Come Together", a big winner - the last tracks are "The End" and "Her Majesty", two unknowns. The Indigo Girls' eponymous album begins with "Closer to Fine" and ends with "History of Us". Phil Collins' Face Value starts with "In the Air Tonight", ends with "Tomorrow Never Knows". Tracy Chapman starts with "Talkin' Bout a Revolution", ends with "For You".

Joni Mitchell's "Clouds" is a notable exception - the big winner, "Both Sides Now", is the final track - but still. Is it that people buy based on the first N tracks? Do they?

Comments

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I can think of two good reasons for albums to start with their strongest tracks:

1) If someone listens to an album to see if they like it, they're likely to start at the beginning. You want to make a good impression fast.

2) If someone reads the track listing on the back of an album to see if they recognize/like anything on there, again, they start at the top. Attention spans are short. Why risk hiding your big hit in Track 8? (Of course, some albums get around this by slapping an annoying 'Contains Hit Song Whatever!' sticker on the front.)

I have a friend who approaches album composition like an art, both in considering published albums and in making mix compilations. There has to be a certain flow to the tempo of the songs, the style, the topics, to keep things from jarring or from getting too dull. But I don't know how many albums are actually composed that way in the music industry, and how many are put together through arcane marketing directives.

Whatever the reason, it's usually not a bad idea to start off a project with something attention-grabbing.

(Now, ending an album with forgettable songs is another matter entirely...)

[packbat.livejournal.com]

They're good points - (2) hadn't occurred to me, but it's very true. (And the stickers are irritating - especially when I've never heard of the track they pick.)

I have a friend who approaches album composition like an art, both in considering published albums and in making mix compilations.

Well they should! There's a very real difference between a good album and the more obvious sort of "Greatest Hits" disc.

But yes, starting with something attention-grabbing is good. But ending on the right note is good, too! It's a shame.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

On the ending being weak... I haven't given it as much thought, but I suspect the problem is related to the way a lot of CDs these days (and a few tapes, as I recall) end in a 'bonus track', whether it's an extra song or a remixed one or some little snippet of goofing around. It's the sort of thing that gets put on there because the band wants it, and not necessarily because anyone else thinks it's good.

So you have a song the musician loves, wants to keep, isn't so great. They only do so many songs; it's a rough fight to keep it off entirely. Or maybe you need it to pad out the length anyway, even if you're not so enamored of it. Where's the best place to put it, from a marketing standpoint? In the place least listened to: the very end of the album. A lot of people listen to albums straight through, in order, even in this day and age. It stands to reason they'll start from the beginning a lot more often than they'll listen all the way to the end.

Which makes for a weak overall feeling if you want a nice cohesive album, but...most people aren't doing The Wall, they're doing three great songs, four good songs, and two or three more they came up with and tossed on there to make it look like a full album. Coherence and overall composition get sacrificed for "We need more than seven songs or people won't buy this."

[packbat.livejournal.com]

That's definitely a coherent story - that's definitely where the "bonus" live tracks always end up. And if the album is an album-level composition, you have to start at the start and keep going. Ah, well.

[chanlemur.livejournal.com]

The loss of the fine art of album composition is one of the great casualties of our modern, MP3-laden track-driven world, IMO.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

The incentive to make that kind of album is certainly weaker, now, but I'm not that sure it was common before.