An Album Is an Argument About What You Should Hear Next

Albums are sometimes defended with the wrong kind of loyalty. A person who starts with track six has broken the order in which the work came out. They may have heard the record more clearly than someone who dutifully sat through it. The case for a sequence has to be made in sound. It needs to show what later music has to remember and why a record is willing to make a listener wait for the most obvious song.

Suppose the best thing on a record is a small confession. It could go first and have an immediate intimacy. Four songs later, after someone has put a lot of effort into sounding certain, it can destroy a character the listener was starting to believe in. The confession has the same notes and a different action. The preceding songs taught the listener what would be surprising. Sequence is one of the places a musician gets to work on the conditions of an event.

The right to interrupt

Listeners do something serious when they change an order. The track that mattered most to the musician may be a distraction from the part that mattered to someone living with the record. Replay puts one section in a position the work was built to avoid. A song borrowed for a playlist can meet an audience who would never have accepted the invitation to a whole album. An artist should have an interest in that independent life. An album worth defending gives the listener something else to return to once that life has begun.

There are sequences whose account of themselves is weak. Two nearly identical openings can make a fairly keen listener feel they are hearing an argument twice. The demand to experience a whole album can be a way of asking an audience to provide the connections the record has left unfinished. I like hearing somebody make a serious case for a bad stretch of an album. Occasionally the case sends me back. Sometimes cutting the stretch makes the remaining choices clearer.

A streaming interface can make a song look like an item whose principal relationship is to its own popularity. An album asks the musician to give it other relationships. One track can owe an apology to the one before it. One can make a claim the last one will have to revise. The decision about whether any of those relationships is worth the trouble belongs partly to the person holding the record and partly to the person still there when the next track begins.