July 19, 2022
<aside> 📝 This is part of my 30-post speed writing goal I’m calling my Dry Run. Judge me not for my quality, but that I wrote this at all. More here: Writing: A “Dry Run”
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Look, just go ahead and listen to this whole album to get what I mean in the third paragraph down here. See you in 46 minutes.
The Album is an art. Making great music is an art, sure. But making great music that is improved by the music around it, telling a story, creating an experience beyond one single track… that’s hiiiiigh art.
I’m an album listener before I’m a song listener or a playlist listener. I love to hear the layers within an entire album: the recurring motifs (both lyrical and auditory), the energy that’s brought from one track to the next, and the journey the listener takes across a well-crafted album. Great albums use each track to improve the experience for every other track. You get more out of listening to everything together, as opposed to just listening to one song on a playlist (of course, this same logic applies to truly great playlists/mixtapes, but that’s for another time).
One of my favorite albums of all-time is my example for how a great album works: Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear is art. But man, I did not care about its release at the time. The lead single—for whatever reason—was “Bored in the USA”, a pointed, sarcastic ballad about the fictitiousness of love and soulmates. It was the first song I heard by Father John Misty and I didn’t understand it at all. The cynical lyrics, the overlayed laugh track… it all made no sense to me. I would turn it off when it came on the radio.
Then, the album came out and I saw it on some year-ending Best Of lists. So I gave it a shot. Listening to that song in the context of the album completely changes the experience. It’s the crux of the album, it’s FJM’s emotional moment where he tees up an epiphany about love and the listener learns what the album was even about. This track makes the album. Without this song, which sucked as a single, the album wouldn’t be a coherent piece of art—it would merely be a collection of very good songs.
But, I digress. The point isn’t that ILYH is an amazing album. The point is that separate tracks back-to-back on an album can uplift each other, creating a better experience than each song is separately. When it works, it’s magic. Take your pick for the metaphor here: track one sets you up, track two knocks you down. Track one tees up track two. These tracks are like cheese and wine: amazing on their own but even better together.
Some of my favorite, most memorable music follows this pattern. Two tracks that are so in sync that I go out of my way to listen to them together. In these situations I’ve been conditioned to expect the second song after the first—if I hear one song played without the other it just feels wrong.
These are the best examples of this that come to mind. Of course, this is based off my music taste so it’s unfortunately heavy on 2010s indie rock. In the meantime, though, feel free to contribute.
Most of these tracks are on albums that appear on my Library page, a list of ~125 of my favorite albums.
Microshift (2018) — Hookworms
This is my favorite example of this phenomenon and includes one of my favorite songs of all-time (on one of my favorite albums to boot).
The Soft Season plays like a long intro to Opener, building tension for four minutes. I turn up the volume and listen closer. The first track smoothly transitions to Opener, which has its own slow, building, fascinating intro. When the opener to Opener finally resolves at 3:04 we’re over seven minutes into this back-to-back set, and it’s all worth it.
A long, long intro like this isn’t exactly easy listening but it’s extremely satisfying. You forget that the music hasn’t had a break in forever and it’s just been continuous movement on movement. It’s engrossing. It gets me every time.