The Internet has created an
essential polarity in how musicians play with track listing—pulled back and
forth between the choices made by musical acts such as Coldplay and Paul
Westerberg.
If you missed the first part (it
is right below or to your right, so you can read it), I began with the
tentative case studies of Coldplay’s Mylo
Xyloto and Westerberg’s 49:00 as
albums that represent opposite ends of how artists are choosing to deal with
track listing in the past couple years. I’ll start by looking at Westerberg’s
approach because it’s certainly the more extreme of the two cases.
~
Westerberg, for those who are
unfamiliar with his work, was the lead singer and songwriter for the
Minneapolis-based alternative/punk band The Replacements through 1991 when he
broke up the band to pursue a solo career. That solo career has been spotty,
but not without its highlights—including two songs on the soundtrack of Cameron
Crowe’s film Singles as well as a
host of well-reviewed albums (though nothing in his solo ouerve has been quite
as well received as the classic Replacements albums). Westerberg has, in recent
years, journeyed further and further away from the music industry, not only
recording albums in his own basement, but eventually releasing them on the
Internet more or less as according to him whim.
[My discovery of this YouTube video is fascinating, because any YouTube
user/viewer is confronted immediately by the reality of the "tracked" version of the album—one would not be able to listen only to "Terri" in the case of Westerberg's album without some serious iTunes / music player fiddling.]
Westerberg’s DIY impulses reached
a climax with 2008’s 49:00—released
without (much of) a title, any track listing or liner notes, cover art, and
available only for download on
Amazon.com for the mere trifle of $0.49. (Get it? $0.49 for 49.00!) The most striking part about the
release, however, was not its lack of presentation—many people download music
these days and couldn’t care less about album art or liner notes—but rather the
stark reality of a single .mp3 file without even any easily divisible “tracks.”
There are certainly songs on the album that might be easily excised as single
tracks given some fun time in a sound-editing program, but there are other
tracks that blend together and tracks that interrupt other tracks.
While there’s lots to be said
about the fascinating nature of the album and how it plays into Westerberg’s
ostensible ideas about rock music and recordings, the takeaway point in this
discussion centers on how the album celebrates the idea of “album” rather than
“song” or “track.” In the case of 49:00,
the division of the album into separate audio tracks would probably have left
many of the pieces feeling disjointed as well as simply superfluous. The
twenty-second songs thrown into the mix of 49:00
would have certainly been scrapped in putting together a traditional album. But,
with the single audio file, all the random musical ideas presented by
Westerberg are perceived as part of a larger whole rather than as individual
files that can simply be deleted (quite literally…I have deleted some of those
“inter-tracks” myself).
~
But what happens when we have all
those “inter-tracks” or—to be blunt—a more segmented listening experience? The
reality, of course, is that given choice, people will choose. In discussing Mylo Xyloto with my friend Chelsea, I
came to the odd conclusion that, for some reason, I appreciated how Coldplay
went ahead and divided up into separate tracks songs that might have clung together
as in a Viva La Vida-style track such
as the quite-obviously-double-song “Lovers In Japan / Reign Of Love”—looking in
particular at the pairing of “A Hopeful Transmission” and “Don’t Let It Break
Your Heart.”
My appreciation stemmed from the
fact that I might play “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” without sitting through the introductory 33-second bit of “A
Hopeful Transmission.” Perhaps that sounds like a silly reason for liking an album, but my gut reaction
really was a singular admiration for that willingness to chop up a song into
its separate parts and sell them that way. The reality of iTunes and other
digital music stores is, indeed, that a shorter “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart”
without the instrumental lead-in will
sell better than the alternate longer one.
But my admiration for that move
has slowly soured. After a few listens through Paul Westerberg’s bizarrely-constructed
album, I’ve come to a new appreciation of the open-ended album (or track)
listen that hasn’t been effectively marketed out into its solid pieces. And
that’s not to say that I am making a blanket statement about marketing and
selling music for financial gain. Rather, it’s to say that I’ve gained a new
appreciation for the intrinsic value of a track or an album. The cohesion of
“Lovers In Japan / Reign Of Love” strikes me as somewhat unnecessary, but the
cohesion of a song such as Frightened Rabbit’s “Skip The Youth,” off their
album The Winter Of Mixed Drinks,
strikes me as central and important.
In an interview (that I now
cannot find—but I swear I read it and it is real!), Frightened Rabbit’s lead
singer Scott Hutchison was asked why the band felt compelled to add the opening
section and whether they ever considered leaving it out. Hutchison—or at least
this was how the interview transcript conveyed it—reacted in a really negative
fashion to the question, seemingly upset at the suggestion that the opening
section could have ever been left out of the final song. In Hutchison’s view, the
song presents the listener with three distinct parts—it doesn’t, I think, favor
one part over any other. Thanks to that understanding of the song, all parts
were set together as a single track, rather than split apart.
~
In no way do I wish to suggest
that Westerberg’s track listing model is the best one (or even a very good one
for most artists…though it works for Westerberg), but I want to rather implode
the notion that track divisions are a necessary thing. I myself confessed
earlier to the unreasonable joy that Coldplay had it in them to separate “Mylo
Xyloto” from “Hurts Like Heaven;” that, of course, is an initial reaction and
subject to reflection and change. For those out there who consider the division
of songs as a sacrosanct notion, I think they ought to reflect a little on that
idea…imagine dividing up “Stairway To Heaven” into three parts… (For those
inclined to “hear” such a version of the song, I suggest dividing around 4:20
and then around 5:34.) Or, for that matter, imagine the first part of Derek
& the Dominos “Layla” divided from the second part…where is the balance in
that?
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