I find the idea of an album as a piece of narrative musical storytelling one of the reasons why I was first drawn into the guitar drenched beaches of rock appreciation. I don’t mean “storytelling” in a rock opera or concept album sense, but merely as a twelve-track emotional experience. Recently I tried to put my iPod on shuffle to help me get to sleep but without the usual time to make a connection with any of the songs like I would during the flow of an album I was not as relaxed as I had hoped. It was almost disconcerting. I like to feel I am entering the world of an album and its either simple or complicated dramatic structure. This is the problem I have with “bonus tracks” on the end of CDs nowadays, I like listing to b-sides and live tracks but not tacked onto the flow of an album when, sometimes, I have genuinely been moved by the music then to be interrupted by the sound of a screaming audience at Wembley or elsewhere.

Having been buying up music in only the CD and MP3 format since the inception date of my interest in rock music I have been rather intrigued by the now largely redundant vinyl “side” structure and it’s continuation in modern releases, Contemporary artists still sometimes make reference to two key musical “acts” in the linear notes of their albums even though the songs are played without the required “turn over”. Coldplay had a go with X&Y, as did the Arctic Monkeys with Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not and Green Day recently had 21st Century Breakdown divided into “Acts”, basically vinyl record sides.

On the odd occasion that I create a “mix-tape” or playlist for somebody I will invariably use this methodology and divide the songs in half and address each side as a separate entity, maybe even having an “intermission” instrumental track to bridge the two sides. This is especially interesting when you are combining “Various Artists” and songs with awkward intro’s and outro’s. Quite often with homemade b-side collections I find out why the songs never made it to the album in the first place, it is hard to know where to place them in a running order, but it makes me appreciate what bands have to go tthrough when it comes to finalising a finished product. Below is my attempted Spotify Playlist of Radiohead “B-Side Greatest Hits” which had me sat hunched over my laptop literally until two in the morning trying to figure out the tracklisting.

Time not well spent.

I’m guessing that bands use the old vinyl style of organising songs an ideal way of making sense of all the material they have to make work when put side by side. Sometimes the reaction you get from a song can be completely different depending on its place in an album’s running order, an low-key track may work as a nice ballad when place somewhere at the start but if moved to the end it can become an electrifying and poignant conclusion.

Do you think the art of tracklisting an album will disappear with all the new technology that is available to us, or do you think good clichés work for a reason?

James
(Sheffield)