I’m tired of it! It is in no way ‘dead.’ That must be noted. I despise that kind of language. It’s lazy. It makes people fret and frown unnecessarily. The album is not dead, I’m simply tired of it.

One of my concerns with the album focuses on how it groups content together amorphously. The numbering of the tracks is something that album fanatics talk about with rather obscure and imprecise language. Track 8 on an album can have incredible meaning to certain people. For others, track 3 is the most exciting moment because it defines the tone for all of the music that follows (that taking into account the fact that tracks 1 and 2 are introductory singles, which is not the case for all albums). In the end, the study of track ordering is a science best left foggy. Artists (and mastering engineers) order their content in a way that best serves the “flow” of the album.

The problem with this “flow” logic is that first listens then tend to, well, fail. With classical works, you have a program that tells you the names of the movements. You look at a Beethoven symphony. It has four movements. The title of each movement expresses the tone of what you will hear. You stop paying attention for a few minutes, but when you come back to the moment at hand, you still know that you’re in the slow movement. You can come back. When I experience an album for the first time I never know where I am. All I have is the moment and rare do I get the feeling that that moment extends much farther than the end of the song. Only once you have listened to the whole album can you go back and begin to piece together the track order logic. After a couple of listens (usually breaking up the album into smaller listening) can a full listen-through be satisfying. The experience of the album as a whole is thus problematic, because the experiential narrative must be learned before it can be appreciated.

I believe this “flow” logic comes from the process that many artists follow in creating an album. In my experience, we would write some songs, record them, and then we would decide the order of the album by listening. I could make the argument that this is a wonderfully pure form of decision-making. Anti-intellectual, etc. There were always songs, though, that no matter where we placed them on the album, didn’t fit. The pitch-content transition between songs was awkward, the emotional landscape shifted too quickly, or the two songs on a very superficial level sounded too alike, thus diminishing the impact of both songs. We worked on each song separately and heard each develop into, hopefully, something uniquely magnificent. Cliche, right, but we the artists would sit down and craft each puzzle piece before putting the full picture together. Problematic!

For us it was fun to try and contextualize each song. Each song already had meaning to us, and now we could extend their meanings further by putting them into a larger context. My issue with this is that as a consumer, I think of the album first, the songs second. The best songs on a sub-par album suffer under the weight of the whole. I can’t get them out of the album, even if I go as far as purchasing a song separately on iTunes or Amazon. That amazing song is a piece of something, contributes to something larger than itself, thus I am always left feeling slightly unfulfilled if digested solely separated.

[I'm cutting myself off here. Already covered too many topics in too few words. Think of this as an introduction, then. 'Two' will be more succinct, hopefully]