Maybe Our Nostalgia is Wrong

The cool thing about having Last.fm is that you get to see your music listening habits form in real-time. What’s even more remarkable is the longer you have Last.fm, the more history you build about yourself. I’m not even talking about “history” in some platitudinal sense; I’m talking deep lore. 

For those unfamiliar, Last.fm is a music-based social media platform that allows its users to record what songs they’re listening to as they’re listening to them. This results in lots of stats like how many times you’ve listened to specific artists, albums, or songs over the course of your account’s history. It also keeps track of what songs you listen to when. And things get specific. I’m talking down to the week specific. I’m talking see-what-you-were-listening-to-at-precise-times-on-certain-days specific. 

This means that, through Last.fm, you can see every regrettable phase, every questionable album, and every unfortunate musical decision you’ve ever made. It’s less a social media site and more of a personal catalog. It’s a place to see your listening habits laid bare. In my specific case, that means I have data on basically every song I’ve listened to since my senior year of high school. That means I can look back and see my metalcore phase, my indie rock phase, my hip-hop phase, my emo phase, and even that time I tried to “get into” Bach, all of which are mapped out and available for anyone to dig through. I’m not naming names, but I’m not going to pretend all of that was pure gold. 

Thanks to Last.fm, I can flip back in time and see what albums soundtracked my last high school summer. I have the ability to drill down and see exactly what I listened to on my birthday in 2014. I can find out exactly what song I was listening to at 2:15 pm on February 19th, 2018, an unremarkable Monday (it was “Brown Paper Bag” by Migos, in case you were wondering). Last.fm is that specific. 

What I don’t need Last.fm for, however, is to help me remember those phases. As detailed above, I’ve spent the last decade-plus listening to everything from A.G. Cook to ZZ Top. I don’t regret any of my musical phases, but I’m not going to pretend all of the music was objectively great. I don’t need a website to tell me I had a metalcore phase, but, luckily(?) it’s all detailed, timestamped, and dated out from April 19th of 2010 onward. 

I don’t need Last.fm to know I had a metalcore phase because I remember it quite well all on my own. I also don’t need a website to tell me I listened to copious amounts of shitty screaming white dudes in high school because I have playlists, merch, and articles on this very site that will all tell you the same thing. 

I’ll still go to bat for many of the heavily-tatted, swoopy-haired, v-neck-clad music of my youth, but it’s near impossible to separate my nostalgia for that period from the music itself. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Blessthefall is a great band, but what I will say is that “Black Rose Dying” still goes hard as fuck when I listen to it in 2021. Does it go hard because it’s a well-made song, or does it go hard because it takes me back to a pleasant time in my life? That’s impossible for me to say. 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Broadway’s Kingdoms is a genre-defying classic. I’m not going to tell you that Someday Came Suddenly is an innovative, ground-breaking work of high art. I’m definitely not going to say that As If Everything Was Held In Place will be getting a wealth of brand new listeners in 2021. Those albums all have redeeming qualities, but I recognize almost nobody hears those albums as I hear them… and that’s completely understandable. 

The other night I was reflecting on my workday while watching an episode of Gilmore Girls and enjoying a cup of sleepytime tea. Over the course of months, this has become a time-honored tradition in my apartment, and I’d say it’s one of the few things keeping me grounded in 2021. As can often happen, someone said or did something in the show that made me think of a song. This phenomenon is liable to happen at any time in my day-to-day, but in this case, it happened to be someone in Gilmore Girls saying the word “Breathless.” That’s a pretty nondescript word, yet, for some reason, hearing it sent a pang shooting to some distant corner of my brain, which unearthed a memory of the song “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria. 

See, Last.fm is cool because it can tell me that I’ve listened to “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria precisely 29 times in my life. That song first released on an EP called Life Gone Wild on December 21st of 2010, and I created my Last.fm account eight months earlier in April of the same year. In other words, I have recorded data on every single time I’ve listened to “Breathless,” in this case, all 29 instances. That song is exactly four-minutes and nine seconds long. I’ll save you the math and tell you that 4:09 times 29 is 120 minutes and 35 seconds. One hundred and twenty minutes and thirty-five seconds. That means I’ve spent two hours of my life listening to “Breathless” by Asking Alexandria. Holy shit. 

As I threw the song on in 2021, years removed from its context or listening to this kind of music every day, I was struck by just how bland it was. The guitars were punchy, the screams were serviceable, and the breakdowns… existed, but as a 27-year-old, I could not bring myself even close to enjoying it on the same level as I did one decade ago. It’s a fine metalcore song, but I was surprised by how much mediocrity I had allowed my younger self to put up with. More specifically, I was surprised that I’d willingly sought out this mediocrity for over two collective hours of my life. 

This two-hour stat on its own is shocking, but what surprised me most in re-listening to the song was just how by-the-numbers blah it was. As the outro played a guttural repetition of “Forget my name / Forget my face,” all I could think to myself was ‘why?’ Why did I do this to myself? Why did I spend so much time with this song and this EP? Why did I not see this as substanceless garbage at the time?

I don’t know what it is about that line in particular that stood out to me, but it just felt so bland and uninspired that it led me to re-evaluate my entire high school metalcore phase. I’ve never been a big “lyrics guy,” and now I can see why. I listened to music like this for braindead caveman riffs, crazy high notes, and Crabcore-inspiring absurdity. I do not listen to metalcore songs for the message. Maybe I’ve tricked myself into thinking that not considering lyrics is the ideal way to listen to music because I always knew the writing was dogshit. 

“Breathless” isn’t tied to anything specific. It’s not a song worth mentioning, worth writing about, or even really worth listening to in 2021. It’s a fine metalcore song, but I just don’t have much nostalgia for it. That made me realize that a good majority of my favorite records from 2010s-era Rise Records bands are probably just as lifeless. They’re bolstered almost entirely by nostalgia and nothing more. I think that’s something I knew subconsciously but only recently came to recognize on my own. 

Listening to “Breathless” helped me realize how sometimes our nostalgia can be wrong. Memory is a powerful drug, and the haze of far-off happy memories is thick. Not only are those memories are obscured by the distance of time, but they’re also rarely as happy as we make them out to be in our heads. I don’t regret the two hours I’ve spent listening to “Breathless,” I just sometimes wish that time was spent on something better. In another ten years, I’m likely going to look back on what I’m listening to now and find myself again asking, “Why?” but for now, I’ll just try to enjoy the music before the nostalgia solidifies. 

Music, Life, and Tigers Jaw: How We Remember Music

As I write this, I’m listening to “Hesitation,” a single off the Tigers Jaw’s upcoming album I Won't Care How You Remember Me. My history with Tigers Jaw is long and winding, but the tl;dr version is that I (like many other people) have a soft spot for their self-titled album. While I have come to adore Charmer and think spin has some undeniable bangers, nothing the band has ever made since 2008 has quite reached the peak of that landmark emo album… but why? 

As I listened to the first few seconds of “Hesitation,” I was able to suspend my disbelief and, just for a moment, hear an emo riff that would have sounded perfectly at-home on that pizza-adorned favorite of mine. “Hesitation” itself is great, but hearing such an evocative piece of guitarwork made me realize that even if we get a better Tigers Jaw album than the self-titled record, we’ll never get another Tigers Jaw album that hits quite the same. 

Tigers Jaw is an immensely personal album to me, and I know I’m not alone in that. The band’s top songs on Spotify pull largely from their 2008 release. For some fans, it evokes long-lost decade-old memories of high school nights spent with friends or the sweat-and-beer smell of DIY shows. For me, the band’s self-titled record is forever tied to a very specific and formative spring term in college. I think the songs are great, obviously, but I only recently realized how much those subjective feelings inform my love for the album. 

Hearing the opening notes to “The Sun” instantly takes me back into a time of my life where everything seemed to be turning around, and it made me realize nobody else has those memories. Nobody else listens to Tigers Jaw and feels the exact way I feel. We may hear the same choruses and see the same sentiments captured in the songs, but nobody feels the exact weird mix of emotions I experienced that spring term. Nobody hears “Plane vs. Tank vs. Submarine” and thinks about studying beat poetry for their English class. No Tigers Jaw fan hears “Never Saw It Coming” and can conjure to mind the strange melancholy I felt on that one weird train ride home after a bad day. Not a single soul associates “Meals On Wheels” with the optimistic feeling of basking in the sun after a long, cold, rainy Oregon winter and feeling a sense of self-assuredness for the first time in years. Those are all me. Those are all Tigers Jaw.

My point is I love Tigers Jaw not just because it’s a great album but because it is synonymous with a very important time in my life. No other Tigers Jaw album, no matter how good, will ever broach that strange mix of musical excellence and nostalgia. Tigers Jaw is encased in amber. It’s trapped in time. It’s something that can never be reclaimed, recreated, or bested. 

I’m incredibly excited about the new Tigers Jaw album. I’m happy they’re still around, and I’m glad they’re still putting out incredible music after a decade and a half together as a band. It’s just odd to hear something like that opening riff on “Hesitation,” which sounds like a familiar memory yet is completely new. It’s a strange sense of musical and emotional deja vu. It made me realize that I Won't Care How You Remember Me will eventually be someone’s Tigers Jaw. Somebody will listen to these songs, fall in love with them, and forever associate them with a specific and important time in their life. 

That power of association is an extraordinary aspect of music that can make things unfair at times. As an artist, it’s unfair that you can never recreate something that appeals to a fan in the exact same way, just in a different way. The songs on I Won't Care How You Remember Me might grow associations that I look back on as fondly as the songs on Tigers Jaw, but I won’t know until I look back on them with an equivalent amount of time. Right now, it just feels like “New Tigers Jaw” versus “Old Tigers Jaw,” but it’s important to remember that there’s also a decade-plus worth of memories that comes with the latter one. It’s apples and oranges. 

That phenomenon of musical nostalgia is also unfair as a fan. You can never explain quite why an old album appeals to you. Yes, you can share the songs, break down the lyrics, analyze the instrumentation, and use beautiful flowery language to impart the feeling that it gives you. Still, you will never be able to explain the complex web of associations and sentimentality you feel when listening to it. It’s sad because nobody will ever relate to these songs in the exact same way, yet the cool thing is that you can still find a way to relate.

That’s what makes music writing fun. Reviewing music is just a writer attempting to explain how a song or album makes them feel before those associations set in. Over time, everyone will form their own unique opinions of, feelings on, and relationships with the music that are all unreplicable. It makes this job hard because I can never completely explain what Tigers Jaw means to me, but it fills me with a strange sense of awe and optimism knowing that someone will be experiencing their own version of those feelings with I Won't Care How You Remember Me. It makes me think about the infinite number of feelings and associations people already have with Tigers Jaw. That album has been out 13 years, and I guarantee other people have experiences tied to that album that are just as powerful as mine; they’re just powerful in a different way. 

It makes me look on at music in wonder. It makes concerts astonishing. That we can all stand in the same room, sit in the same theater, or crowd together in the same basement and all experience something together at the same time, all forming a new association with those songs at the same time. It’s encoding something in us in real-time. It’s bonding us forever. 

Music is beautiful because it can bring us together in those moments, if only for an hour or so. Eventually, we’ll all look back on that time we saw Tigers Jaw live and how much fun we had that night. Or how bad it was. Or the weird drunk dude who kept shouting the lyrics at the top of his lungs and spilled beer on the person in front of him. Twice. Associations are infinite. There’s an endless number of feelings, and each person will remember them differently. What’s more, those feelings can never be wholly imparted upon another soul. We can get together physically or digitally and find solace in the same piece of music. We can also listen on our own, live our lives the best way we know, and grow those personal feelings over time. We can talk about music now or find each other years down the line. Music is both collaborative and solitary. It’s communal and custom. The best part is that it’s powerful no matter what. 

That’s why I encourage anyone and everyone to write about music. That’s why I purposely choose to focus this blog on the intersection between music and life. Because you can’t have one without the other, and there’s no “right” way to write about those associations or convey those feelings. It’s why every discography ranking, countdown, and year-end list is inherently flawed. A writer can say the music “rips,” “shreds,” or “slaps” all day long. You can analyze the choruses, examine the guitar solos, and explain the drum pattern, all with perfect terminology, but at the end of the day, that’s just describing the music. If you’re writing about an old album, and if it’s an album that’s truly dear to you, then try to capture the layer just beyond. Try to explain your feelings, your truth, your life that lies just beyond the music. Try to explain your musical associations and lay out your experiences. Attempt to capture that beautiful and unique essence that you bring to the music. That’s the art of music writing, that’s where the beauty lies. That’s the intersection between music and life.

This all makes the name of Tigers Jaw’s new album feel particularly apt; I Won't Care How You Remember Me. I haven’t heard the album yet, so I don’t know the context in which that sentiment is delivered, but it makes me think about my own history with the band. It makes me think about all of our separate histories with the band. Tigers Jaw don’t care if you love this album or hate it. They don’t care if you view it as better or worse than their self-titled. None of that matters to them. They don’t care how you remember them. All that matters is that you remember them. 

How Spotify Made Music Disposable

“You can’t record music every three or four years and think that’s going to be enough.” That was a sentence uttered in an interview earlier this year by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Widely derided by musicians and fans alike, this sound bite brought the “Streaming Discussion™” back to the forefront of music circles on places like Twitter and Reddit. While very few artists are happy with the financial arrangement between themselves and Spotify, this statement breathed new life into the unrest at the heart of this agreement. This suggestion of “just release more music” also brought to the forefront a litany of problems with the current economic model that platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have used to make millions off of the backs of artists. 

It’s no secret that these services are notoriously stingy, offering up fractions of a penny per stream, but a less-discussed byproduct of this model is how it has literally devalued art and made music more disposable in the process. 

The pandemic (and general state of the world) has obviously caused irreparable damage to our collective mental health and finances alike, but musicians have been hit especially hard. Robbed of the outlet of touring, this has been an unspeakably horrible year for musical artists. Album rollouts have been disrupted, tours have been postponed, and musicians are struggling to make ends meet more than ever before. 

As creators flock to alternative sources of income to keep themselves afloat, the music industry as it stood at the beginning of the year will look very different than the one we see on the other side of this. Groups like Ratboys have taken up Twitch streaming; promoting their merch, prompting donations, and forging direct connections with fans along the way, all while promoting their (excellent) album that released in the weeks before quarantine. Bands like Mannequin Pussy, Prince Daddy, Glass Beach, and Diet Cig have taken to Patreon offering exclusive covers, merch discounts, and access to Dischord channels as benefits. On top of all this, Bandcamp has made a monthly tradition of eschewing their own cut of earnings, the end result being fans putting more than 20 million dollars directly into the pockets of artists, labels, and charities over the course of the summer. 

Then you have Spotify, where it takes 229 streams to make one dollar. Their solution to this? Silly bands, it’s so obvious: simply make more music. Fill their playlists, servers, and coffers with your art if you want to be successful in the musical landscape of 2020.

Near the beginning of quarantine, Spotify gave artists the option to add “donation” buttons to their pages, which, on the surface, seems like a nice gesture, but ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful endeavor. It’s something Spotify can point to and say, “look, see, of course we care about the bands!” Then turn around months later and say things like, “maybe if you were shoveling more coal into our content furnace, you wouldn’t be struggling so much to make ends meet.”

I’ve written before about how “disposable” streaming services have made music, but never went into detail articulating what that meant to me, and this feels like the perfect time. 

At the dawn of commercial music, you’d go to a store and buy your music in the form of a large piece of plastic that you’d bring home and listen to. As time went on, the size and shape of that plastic changed from vinyl to tape to cassette to CD, but the process always remained the same. Soon you could take your music on the go, listening in the car, on a boombox, a walkman, or a portable CD player. At this point, you might be thinking, ‘okay, yeah, thanks for mansplaining physical media to me,’ but this process actually had an impact on how we viewed and interacted with the music itself. 

Due to the financial (and physical) investment you just made, when you bought an album like this, you were going to listen to it, and you were going to listen to it a lot. At a certain point, it almost didn’t even matter if the record was bad or not, because you just sunk $20 into it, and now it’s going to be on your shelf forever. You were going to listen to it over and over and over again. 

My first collection of childhood CDs was pretty appalling. It ranged from stuff like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Simple Plan to Eiffel 65, Aaron Carter, and the Baha Men. Hell, I owned multiple Baha Men CDs. You can probably think of one Baha Men song off the top of your head, but I listened to the deep cuts because I had no other alternatives. If “Who Let The Dogs Out” released in 2020, it would go viral, get the band millions of streams, and then fade out in a month or two. People wouldn’t listen to that song and think, ‘Gee, I wonder what else these guys have to offer’ and then jump into the rest of their discography. 

Even in the mid-2000s, once iPods and mp3 players became widely accessible, your digital music library still had some semblance of connection to who you were as a person. The songs sitting in your iTunes library were all files that you ripped from your own CD collection, bought from Apple, were sent by friends, or obtained through more… nefarious means. It felt like every album, and sometimes even every song, had a story and a purpose. Everything was in its right place, even if it was just a 5mb file sitting somewhere deep in the tangled web of folders on your hard drive.

Now, streaming services have done a lot of good. Having a majority of this century’s auditory output one scroll away is an unspeakable achievement, but it’s a double-edged sword. The flip side of this is that it leads artists to game streaming numbers, create insanely bloated tracklists, and beg fans to fake streams. Those aren’t telltale signs of a sustainable business model. 

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The byproduct of this process for fans is that music is not held with the same reverence when viewed through this platform’s lens. If you’re a capital “M” Music Fan, you’re likely following hundreds, if not thousands of artists from different genres and backgrounds. This is rewarding because it means you have something new to listen to every Friday, probably too much in fact. When there are five to ten new releases to listen to every week, things become buried so quickly that you might not even realize it. 

An artist as big as Taylor Swift can now surprise release an album to critical acclaim and fan approval. It can break records, dominate social media feeds, and feel like a genuine event, only for it to fade from all memory not even a month later. I enjoy folklore, but it’s no longer part of the “culture” as of September 2020, so therefore I’m not thinking of it and not streaming it unless I scroll far back enough in my library to see it. 

You could argue that’s just because it’s a bad album or otherwise unmemorable, but I’ve found this happening with every band, even ones I love dearly. Earlier this year, The Wonder Years, my favorite band of all time, released an acoustic EP that I spun for weeks and weeks but haven’t listened to more than twice this summer. That would have been unthinkable in the era of physical media or iTunes. 

I think the problem here is two-fold. First, it’s platforms like Spotify who capitalize on the hype of something like folklore to generate more users, streams, and engagement for their platforms. Second, I think we’re experiencing an era of unprecedented acceleration in every facet of our lives. Perhaps a product of being sequestered in our homes for six months, our sense of time is skewed beyond repair. Things that happened mere days or weeks ago feel like months or years. How can I remember that an emo band I like put out a new EP two weeks ago when I’m busy filling my brain with social media rot, political discourse, and the horrors of the modern world. 

I’m not begging for the return of the monoculture here, we’ll never return to an era where one band dominates the hearts, charts, and minds of millions of Americans, but it’s frustrating to watch an artistic medium that I love so dearly be treated as a passing fascination. Yeah, cool album you just put out, but what’s next? Artists release one thing, and fans are immediately clamoring for what’s next. It’s harder than ever to fully-digest art as we used to, and streaming platforms like Spotify aren’t helping. 

This is the difference between sipping on a glass of finely-aged whiskey and slamming shots of bottom-shelf vodka…. Not to compare my childhood Baha Men CD to a bottle of whiskey, but you get the point. Dozens of albums came out this year that impacted me in the moment and then faded from my immediate consciousness over time simply because they became buried in the never-ending scroll of my digital streaming library. No matter how much I love an album, something will come out in the next few days that covers it up and pushes it further down the screen. I’ve learned to keep a database of new releases and a shortlist of my favorites, but that’s because I run a music blog, I am far from the average use case.

At the end of the day, most people are perfectly fine throwing on a Spotify-created playlist and vegging out to whatever the algorithm sees fit. I know active listening will never become a truly lost art, but I feel awful for artists who put hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and incalculable amounts of effort into their art only for it to be swallowed up by the streaming beast and fade into obscurity within weeks. This is yet another reason why vinyl and cassettes are enjoying a resurgence because people are hungry to reconnect with art. 

Try as we might with petitions, outreach, and just roasting them on twitter, Spotify isn’t going to change any time soon. This is the norm for the foreseeable future, and it kind of sucks. It sucks for artists, and it sucks for fans. In fact, it sucks for everyone involved except the people at the top making millions of dollars off the blood, sweat, and tears of every artist at the bottom of the pyramid. 

Streaming services treat music just like that; a service. Spotify will continue to exploit artists in order to fuel their machine, so as fans, we need to break out of that routine whenever possible. There’s no preciousness anymore unless you bring it, so let’s bring it. Go support an artist’s Patreon, go start a thread on twitter, go buy a shirt on Bandcamp, go post a makeup selfie inspired by a band’s album art. Those are only a few ways to connect with artists, but they go farther than you probably realize; you never know how much your support snowballs. As long as there are passionate fans supporting artists, sharing music, and spreading songs that they love, streaming services will never truly be able to make music disposable, try as they might. 

Lamenting the Death of The Hidden Track

Not to sound like a copypasta, but I listen to a lot of music. Even before quarantine, I spent most of my waking hours with something playing on my phone. Now that I’m inside all day and have very few real-world obligations, music is playing from virtually the minute I wake up until the second I fall asleep. This means, yes, I’m on my emo bullshit more than ever before, but it also means that I have the time to revisit lots of older albums from my childhood.

As someone who was born in 1993, I grew up in a time where CDs reigned supreme. My parents had hundreds, if not thousands of CDs, which was probably where my obsession with music began. We listened to music in the car, at home on our stereo, and in my room on my personal CD player. Once I got my first iPod back in 2004, I eventually just started ripping every CD that I had even a passing interest in, quickly building out an expansive library of MP3 files to satiate my voracious musical appetite. 

Now that I have more hours than ever in the day to listen to music, I’m breaking out of my typical emo/indie rock rotation and revisiting more classics from my childhood. Albums like Barenaked Ladies’ Gordon, Presidents of the United States self-titled record, and Relient K’s Two Lefts Don’t Make A Right… But Three Do. I’m not necessarily going to bat for the artistic merit of any of these records because my mind is too clouded with the pleasant glow of nostalgia to listen to them objectively. What I will say though is in revisiting all these 90’s and 2000’s albums, I was reminded of a trend that seems to have been forgotten completely: the hidden track. 

It may seem goofy to explain, but for the sake of anyone under the age of 20 reading this, “hidden tracks” were essentially bonus tracks buried at the end of an album, usually after a long period of silence. The experience of discovering these hidden treasures was almost always notable. Whether it was being jolted awake by the chuggy stoner rock riffage of “Endless, Nameless” or being blindsided by the Daniel Johnston-ey weirdness of Green Day’s “All By Myself,” the hidden track provided artists with an outlet to deliver die-hard fans some of their weirdest, most left-field easter eggs. 

While vinyl records and cassettes had their own novelties, the hidden track was a unique byproduct of the compact disc format. The expansion from a vinyl’s 44-minute running time to CD’s 74-minute running time meant that artists had nearly double the amount of time to play with. This was even an increase from cassette tape’s roughly 60-minute running time. While some artists utilized CD’s entire time allotment, the average running time of an album still hovered somewhere between the 40-60 minute range. That meant a large chunk of extra time at the end of the CD for literally anything else. 

The experience of listening to an album, reaching the end, and sitting in silence for a few minutes is a near-lost art. The surprise of an additional piece of music that wasn’t listed on the back of the album is all but dead. 

The hidden track began to mean less as soon as iTunes and other music digitization meant all the raw MP3s and their running times were exposed. This meant that the final track with a suspicious 10-minute running time was a little less sneaky than the artist originally intended. It also meant you could just skip straight ahead by clicking on the timeline in your music player of choice. Sure, you could do this on a CD too, but that “first listen” surprise is gone forever. 

Even now, most of these songs exist on streaming services, but they’re just listed as their own song without any pause or gap in between the album’s intended closer. This is especially frustrating because it’s not the true “ending” of the album as the artist intended. For the most part, hidden tracks were meant to be throwaway jokes, weird little callbacks, or fun bits of studio chatter, they were not real songs, but now streaming services treat them as such.

Sometimes there are legitimately great tracks hidden at the end of records that, for whatever reason, the band just didn’t feel like highlighting on the tracklist proper. Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever To Tell is a landmark album for many reasons, but why something as great as “Poor Song” was tucked away unlabeled at the end of “Modern Romance” will forever be a mystery to me. 

Tracks like “Poor Song” were the exception rather than the rule, and if you need evidence, look no further than practically any one of Blink 182’s albums. It’s hard to accurately articulate the strange mixture of shock and confusion of being nine years old and hearing “When You Fucked Grandpa” while listening to Take Off Your Pants and Jacket for the first time… hell, I still get blindsided by that one. 

The digitization of music has arguably brought more good than bad. It’s easier than ever to discover a new artist, share songs with your friends, and even get your own music out into the world on a massive scale. On the flip side, losing physical media means the average listener views music as more disposable and less unique. This is all on top of the fact that there are now even fewer opportunities for format-based easter eggs like hidden tracks.

I’m not going to pretend that the death of hidden tracks is as terrible as artists being paid fractions of a penny per stream, but it’s something that still hurts as a lifelong music nerd. Things like this are why vinyl had a resurgence because it gave artists the opportunity to go above and beyond with their art. Same thing with cassettes… that’s more of an affordability thing, but there’s no denying how cool it is to fold out a new J-Card for the first time. Hell, I’ve even seen people getting back into VHS in 2020, so who knows what the future holds. Hidden tracks may have become a forgotten art form, but I have faith that the next generation of musicians will find something even cooler to replace them with. 

Apropos of nothing but being stoned, I recently watched 2002’s Scooby-Doo and was struck by the movie’s depiction of early-2000’s cool. It was all radio-sanitized pop-punk, spiked hair, and frosted tips. I remember thinking, “these college kids are so cool” when I watched the movie back in 2002, but now it’s just a hilariously-dated time capsule. In other words, hidden tracks had their time, and that time has passed. Much like frosted tips and chain wallets, maybe it’s for best that we leave them in the past. 

On Running Times: The Importance of Album Length

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of my favorite parts of meeting new people is learning what kind of music they’re into. Usually, I’ll wait for it to come up in conversation naturally (so as not to overwhelm them with the firehose-like pressure of my own nerdiness), but it’s still something I look forward to whenever I’m getting to know someone. Not only is music one of the few things I feel confident in talking about endlessly, but it’s also a fantastic way to learn about who someone is as a person. Sometimes you meet someone who isn’t “into music,” and it’s fun because you get to slowly immerse them in your favorite records and reveal a part of yourself to them. Sometimes you meet someone for the first time and you both share a love for so many bands that it’s almost eerie. Those latter cases are fun just because you just get to geek out about cringy high school music that was somehow omnipresent enough for both parties to have separate nostalgia for it. 

Those weird cases of shared musical backgrounds are so rewarding because it feels like some cosmic affirmation of my (mostly questionable) high school music choices. I made a friend like this in early 2019 who shared a nearly-identical background with me of pop-punk, hardcore, and emo. We were kind of at different points in that triangle of genres, but he got me deeper into pop-punk, I got him deeper into emo, and it was a rewarding friendship from that perspective. 

At some point after a few weeks of knowing each other, my friend asked me what my favorite album of 2018 was, and I started going on about Fiddlehead’s Springtime and Blind. I talked about the hard-hitting Title Fight-esque delivery, the guilt-ridden emotional lyricism, and the well-placed world-building interludes. I tied a bow on (what I thought was) a compelling argument in favor of the record by emphasizing its running time of just 24 minutes. My friend paused for a second, thought to himself, then replied with “man, you really love talking about album lengths.” I was taken aback. 

Here I thought I’d made a passionate argument for this album that I adored, and my friend just pointed out how often I bring up running times. But then I thought about it, and he was right. I realized over the course of knowing each other for just a few weeks I’d used that as a selling point in favor of an album more than once. More than that, it also shocked me that the length of an album wasn’t something he particularly cared about. 

Earlier this year, I was listening to the new Beach Bunny record and (half) jokingly tweeted that “any LP that's less than 26 minutes is an automatic 9/10 in my mind.” That’s obviously a slight exaggeration, but I do think that shorter albums are generally better and harder to pull off than longer ones. While I realize the running time of a record may seem like an esoteric piece of trivia, I believe it’s actually a vital component of what makes an album good. Sure, I love long-winded double albums, 20-minute songs, and concept albums as much as the next guy, but by and large most of my favorite records, especially recently, are ones that tend to be leaner and more economical with their time. Hell, my favorite album of last year was a 6-track EP, so this post is a long time coming. Truthfully I think shorter records are harder to make and therefore are not the norm. I also think they can be stronger, more creative, and more impactful than a “traditional”-length album for many reasons.

In my mind, an album’s running time is as essential as it’s tracklist or sequencing. Many artists don’t take those things into consideration, but the ones that do often end up crafting a more compelling piece of art. The new Ratboys album is a perfect example of a masterfully-sequenced record; each side opens with a fast-paced single, side one closes with a banger, and the back half of the album works up to a beautifully meditative title track made all the more poignant by the flow of the songs that come before it. Part of what makes Printer’s Devil great is, yes, the songs themselves, but also how the band decided to order those songs and walk the listener through them. You could take those same 11 tracks, rearrange them, and the album would be flat-out worse. 

When an artist releases an album, generally, it has a point. The musician sets out to capture a feeling, depict a time in their life, or make a statement on something in the world. If you can get your point across in less time, that only makes your message all the more compelling. One of the first times I consciously began to think about album running times was when Japanese Breakfast released Psychompmp back in 2016. Admittedly enamored with the (now) infamous long-form indieheads shitpost about the album, I went into the record with almost-non-existent expectations and came out the other side 25-minutes later blown away. 

Essentially a concept album about her mother’s death, Michelle Zauner set out to capture her grief, experiences, and feelings that surrounded this major event in her life. The album opens poppy enough with the mystifying “In Heaven,” the soaring “Rugged Country,” and the immensely danceable “Everybody Wants to Love You.” Things take a turn halfway through where the titular “Psychopomp” stops the listener in their tracks with a spacy instrumental containing a voicemail of Michelle’s mom. From there, “Jane Cum” bowls the listener over with a wordless explosion of grief, pain, and sharp feelings. Not only is “Jane Cum” one of the most authentic expressions of loss ever captured in music, but it’s made stronger thanks to the songs that surround it. The record is so well-paced, and it’s conscious build-up to that pivotal moment of loss makes the feelings Michelle’s depicting all the more raw and impactful. After that heaviness “Heft,” “Moon on the Bath,” and “Triple 7” act as a sort of post-script to death that sends the listener off on a (slightly) more hopeful note, though not by much. The fact that Michelle was able to fit all of those feelings into an album that’s shorter than most episodes of TV is nothing short of spectacular.

One of the reasons I love music is because it’s the only medium with the ability to make such a compelling depiction in such a short amount of time. TV shows and movies are great, but at best they take 2 hours to create a similar effect. I suppose you could make the argument that shorter-form art house movies broach a similar level of impact, but even then the two mediums don’t exist in the same quantities. There’s a more compelling narrative in the four and a half minutes of “Born to Run” than there was in whatever new teen drama Netflix shat out this weekend. There’s no comparison.

This feels like a good place to say that I’m not against long albums, one of my favorite records of all time is The Monitor by Titus Andronicus; a 65-minute punk epic that’s loaded with 8-minute songs and capped off by a blistering 14-minute coda. The same thing goes for Sufjan’s Michigan, and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, sure I’m cherry-picking some of the greatest albums of all time, but they’re all examples of artists using their hour-plus running times to craft a compelling story that could not have been told any other way. Those records are still economical in that sense, it’s just that they take a little bit longer to arrive at their final conclusion.

On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, you have records like Migos’ Culture II, which is admittedly a bloated 24-track 2-hour mess, but it’s a bloated mess I don’t have a problem with because it’s just a glorified playlist that you put on while doing anything else. Drake literally did this when he released More Life, a mixtape that he marketed as a “playlist.” That’s code for “don’t think about this too much and just give me 22 streams.” I’ll admit I like More Life alright, but then you see the same thing happening on Scorpion, which is 90 minutes of some of the blandest, most mind-numbing, lobotomy-inducing hip-hop that I’ve ever heard in one place. That album just feels like Drake gaming the streaming system to get as many plays as possible while offering nothing of artistic substance. 

Another thing worth bringing up here is the history of the physical album. The fact that records used to be based solely on two 23-minute sides of a vinyl record meant that 40-ish minutes became the default. Then once CDs became prominent enough, their 80-minute capacity meant that hour-length albums could become the norm. Once iTunes, Pandora, and digital music paved the way for streaming services an album could be literally anything. Artists are no longer restricted by the realities of a physical format, and that’s a good thing.

I know there are plenty of people out there who just listen to an album, click the “heart” button on their favorite songs, and then craft their daily music experience around a playlist of those cherry-picked favorites. That’s fine, but I believe that the album format is still a viable medium and an essential piece of the music creation process. I feel that “The Album” is the barometer under which all music should be measured. You can have a couple of great tracks, but if the rest of the songs surrounding it don’t measure up, then you don’t have a great album. That’s part of the problem with albums like Scorpion where you have a few objectively fire songs like “Nonstop” and “Nice For What” surrounded by utter nonsense like “Ratchet Happy Birthday.” Truth be told, I can’t even name any of the other “bad” songs on that album because there’s so much fat that record that it all blurs into one incoherent mess of sleepy pop-rap. It makes me like the entire thing less, and therein lies the problem. 

Meanwhile, take a look a the new Beach Bunny album; a 9 track 25-minute debut that ranges from catchy sing-along love songs, confessional tales of heartbreak, and masterful builds of unrequited love. Truth be told, Honeymoon is not really making any grand artistic statement on love and relationships, but it set out to offer a collection of saccharin poppy love songs, and it did just that. It didn’t need an hour, it didn’t need interludes, it’s just nine tight tracks of well-written indie-pop and that alone elevates it above other albums of its ilk.

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The minute an album has worn on long enough for you to check the tracklist to see how much is left, then the artist has failed. Every preceding song may be great, but the longer an album is, the more chances there are for lulls like that. The shorter a record is, the less room there is for error.

I’m not saying artists should limit themselves; musicians should take as much time as they need to craft their work and get their point across, it’s just that the less time they manage to do it in, the more impactful the message feels. Much like you’re probably reading this, 1900 words deep and wondering when it will end. 

The “album” is a fluid concept in 2020, more fluid than it’s ever been in fact. There are artists breaking barriers every day, and album length is only one small piece of that. It just feels notable to me when an artist manages to create something so compelling and get it across in such a short amount of time. After all, if you love it and want more, you can always just start it all over again from the top.