The Loss of the Album Side

And what you can do about it

Photo by Andrea Cipriani on Unsplash

I am not nostalgic about vinyl records. I went through a brief phase a few years ago when I fired up the old turntable and went out in search of obscure used LPs. The experience reminded me of all of the problems with vinyl. First of all, it's heavy. If you are moving house or even rearranging a room, shelves of records can be back-breaking to shift.

Records are fragile. No matter how gingerly you handle them, no matter how carefully you clean them, they will degrade each time you play them and develop pops and scratches and skips and repeats. I do not find these sounds charming or comforting. I want pristine recorded sound.

You can't listen to records on the go. I know that there are people who value this quality, but for me, portable listening is absolutely essential for how I like to experience recorded music. Yes, I miss reading liner notes in a larger format and enjoying album art, but these are sacrifices that I'm willing to make.

There is, however, one important aspect of vinyl records that we have lost, and this loss has changed the way that we experience music, I think to our detriment. The good news is that there are ways of counteracting this loss, and there are methods that complement the process of personal canon formation. But first, what is the problem?

We have lost the temporal length of the album side.

Why is this a problem? When we listen to music on vinyl, we are limited to about twenty minutes (or slightly more or slightly less) before we must make a decision: do I get up and flip the record? or do I listen to another record? or is that enough music for the moment? Twenty minutes is a short enough duration to allow us to focus on the music, to experience it in a digestible portion. Much longer, and it may fade into the background, or we may tire of it. When we make the decision to flip the record, we are consciously determining that we will listen for another twenty-minute chunk of time. The decision is not made for us, and it requires physical, bodily action to continue the music.¹

We do not have this experience when we listen to playlists, which can go on for hours and hours—or even to CDs, which can last up to eighty minutes, and as a result, music for many people has become a sort of sonic wallpaper—a continuous flow of sound that fades into the background of consciousness.

Worst of all are the algorithms that provide us with a continuous stream of intentionally bland, unoffensive music. The brilliant Substacker

Ted Gioia

has written extensively about the insidious nature of Spotify's algorithms—designed largely to drain musicians' limited incomes with tiny payments per stream or, worse yet, AI-generated music.

There are, of course, times when this background-music flow may be useful—when you're studying, for example. This is why ambient music was invented. But if we want recorded music to be art, an aesthetic experience that deserves our attention, then we need a different approach.

Because of my generation, and because I listen to a lot of classical music, I tend to be an album listener rather than a curated playlist listener (or, the old days, a singles listener). I make long playlists of a number of entire records, and this works well. (Each new album that comes out that I want to listen to, for example, goes into a playlist called “New Queue.”) However, in recent months I’ve tried something new, and I’ve been enjoying it tremendously. I have a series of variable-content playlists called “Album Side 1,” Album Side 2,” etc. I fill these each day with album-side selections of between 15 and 25 minutes or so. This is easy enough for traditional-length, older albums: simply divide them where you had to turn over the record in the old days (after “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” on Sgt. Pepper, for example). For longer records (and most post-LP-era albums are longer), you just do a bit of math, and occasionally you might end up with something that is a bit longer, or with a three-sided album, especially with classical music. But there’s no need to be too precious with it.

Is this fiddly? Yes. Is it worth it? For me, yes. It’s no more fiddly than getting up, taking a record out of the sleeve, and setting the stylus, and the effect is the same: I’m set for twenty minutes, and then I make a decision about what to do next. In addition to the benefit of length, I have found other unexpected advantages to this method. First, I have rediscovered how great the second sides (or second halves) of some albums are. In the old days, there might have been one side of a record that you played over and over, and sometimes that was side 2. (I’m thinking, for example, of the second side of Synchronicity, or of Purple Rain.) The CD eliminated this tendency, as have the other digital formats, because you always start an album at the beginning. Through this method, I have rediscovered some glorious second sides. For example, listen to tracks 7-11 of Lianne la Havas’s magnificent self-titled album (my “constructed” second side for this 2020 record—though the first six tracks are wonderful too).

This approach may work for you, or it may not. But either way, I encourage you to find ways to break from algorithm-dictated music. For you, this may mean returning to physical media—the LP or (heaven forbid) the cassette tape—or it may mean carefully curating your own playlists. I have found, however, that my method brings with it the advantages of both new and old—the portability and flexibility of digital formats and the temporal limits of the LP side. But the format is less important than the music and your experience of it. Take control of that experience away from our tech overlords and reclaim it for yourself. I promise, you will enjoy your music more.

More Chaucer later this week!

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet record player to yours.

Photo by Jace & Afsoon on Unsplash

1. I do remember stackable turntables that featured a mechanism that would allow to stack several records and then listen to several sides in succession without stopping. However, this was quite fiddly and I think was must useful for dinner parties and for listening to opera, with multi-record boxed sets, whose sides would be set up to allow one to listen with such a mechanism sequentially.