Happy midterm season. To celebrate, here’s a collection of my scattered reflections on what draws me to an album and to music in general. I love the familiar comfort of a cohesive voice and style and the way an album can be a complete storytelling experience. There are a few characteristics of an album that keep me coming back to it. I want variety so that I can have a good build and emotional journey, similar to the elements of plot in fiction writing. An album shouldn’t feel like a playlist, that is to say, I more often organize playlists to set one specific tone and every song contributes to that vibe. In an album, I love a structure that tells different elements of a story, rising with a central theme.
The length of the album is crucial, the sweet spot for me is ±13 songs; too much longer and songs start to fade into the background, shorter and I don’t feel like I get enough of the story. I think of albums like Avril Lavigne’s Let Go and Under My Skin, Ezra Furman’s Perpetual Motion People, and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, which all have 13 songs (excluding the bonus track on The Black Parade). I’m particularly biased towards albums that tie songs together, having one lead perfectly into another, like “The End” into “Dead!” on My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade. Continuity across songs always gets me, like how on Bury Me at Makeout Creek Mitski says she wants “a love that falls as fast a body from a balcony” in “Townie,” and then in the next song she says “One word from you and I would jump off of this ledge I’m on.”
In order to appreciate an album as the art it is, I try to avoid turning it into background noise. There is a distinction between putting on music to enjoy it and putting it on to avoid silence: an aspect of devaluing the work to ascribe it as background noise. To me, music has a scale of active engagement, where listening to live performance is the most engaging and white noise study music is the least. I like the idea of a way to mindfully listen to recorded music, and one way I like to do this is through vinyl. Please don’t mistake me, I’m no audiophile. I’m referring to treating music as a mindful activity and not letting the choice be made for you.
On streaming services, you have an overload of choices and often end up listening to a lot of what the algorithm chooses for you. Picking from your own physical music library puts the choice in your hands and owning physical music allows you a collection of personal history. Spotify is a private company: they can remove artists’ music at any time and digital archives are lacking. When you listen to your library, you take the time to comb through albums, appreciating the album art and inserts, listening to one side and then getting the choice to listen to the other side. When I have people over, it’s fun to let them rummage through my collection and bring that aspect of listening to music as a social activity.
