One Album at a Time
How do you listen to music?
Singles that top the charts are fun. That song you can listen to four times in a row and not get tired of. Go ahead and push repeat, it’s one of my guilty pleasures too.
After a while though, a single gets too repetitive. So I’m glad music comes in albums.
An album is an experience, a full musical meal composed by the band that offers a little more insight than that four minutes of foreplay. Albums have their own track ordering, selection and deliberately flow. Once I’ve discovered I like a band, I hop into their albums. Once I’ve heard the entire album a few times, I will play it through again and again (though not back to back, that’d just be crazy). Good albums, like King Crimson’s THRAK follow a very deliberate flow that make the entire album a musical piece in itself with musical waves larger than individual songs.
Of course, I will skip some tracks; not everything a band slaps on an album is musically tolerable (e.g. The Gutter Twins’ poetic but musically crappy All Misery/Flowers hurts their otherwise masterful Saturnalia).
In my experience, listening to the whole album instead of a smaller selection of songs stretches the listenable lifespan of the band. Hopefully until their next album. For some people, that may be a little too much Led Zeppelin. For me? It’s usually the right amount.