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Legend Agrees with Wheat!

Posted at 5:13 PM on December 19, 2007 by Mark Wheat (1 Comments)

I am desperately trying to defend my position that the album is dead, against heavy opposition!Join the discussion under the original post but first check this interview with Robyn Hitchcock who does a great job of detailing the history of the album and seems to agree with me! Tune in Thursday between 6 and 7pm for a synopsis of the discussion with audio examples.

Comments (1)

Hitchcock hit the mark when he said that the album has become "scarily infinite". Just because you have 79 minutes on a CD doesn't mean you have to use it. When an artist pulls out the old trick of putting 10 minutes of silence at the end of the last song, only to tack on something else, I lose respect for them 95% of the time (notable exception is Kid A, but even then, it's still only a 50-minute record).

What happened to self-editing? If you want to include more material, just go for the gusto and make it a double-disc set. Especially if you do it like Wilco and Being There, where all the music could have fit on a single disc, but splitting it into two 39-minute CDs harkens back to the old days and makes it a lot more palatable. I listened to the National's Boxer again today, and I was a bit surprised that it's only 43 minutes long. I'm going through my top albums of 2007 in my head and thinking about their lengths -- an average length of 45 minutes, I'd say.

In essence, my tip to every musician reading this (and you probably already knew this): Try to keep your albums 45 minutes or under (I agree with Mark, for once, on this point). If you have more (quality) material, save it for another LP and release it 8 months later.

Posted by Mac Wilson | December 19, 2007 7:04 PM

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