My theory is that the best song should be fourth. I’m assuming here that the hit song is the best one, although it definitely doesn’t have to work that way. I think
This is pretty much how I see it. I think the first song has to grab people energetically and draw them in without being too complicated, the second expands things a bit, the third gets people singing along, and the fourth is the grand slam.
Agreed. I think the last track is the best place to put your longest, weirdest, most experimental song - the one is a tough act to follow and that leaves the listener a little confused or with something to think about.
Everybody please remind me not to play baseball with An Arky.
I said first for two reasons:
(1) When I first buy the album, I usually want to hear the hit (i.e., the reason I wanted to buy the album) first.
(2) After I hear a hit enough times, I get sick of it and would prefer to just listen to the rest of the album, so having it first makes it easy to skip over it and listen to everything else.
I voted with the assumption that a fair amount of people had the same listening preferences as me.
I’m actually a bit of two minds about this. In the last band I played in, the first song was almost always a down- or mid-tempo atmospheric number that sort of set the mood, but was not a “show stopper.” We usually put that at number two. Kind of like how “Mellon Collie” starts with that instrumental number, and “Tonight Tonight” comes in at number two (whereas the previous album, follows the more conventional formula rockin’ straight in with “Cherub Rock,” keeping up the momentum with “Quiet” and then tearing into the big hit “Today.”)
Either approach works fine for me, but I tend to like the “start loud and strong, build to hit,” slow things down (if you’re a band that does slow down) and then throw in another strong mid- or up-tempo number in the middle of the pack. That’s where my 1,3,7 “formula” comes from (Number 6 is also a good position for another hit, as is number 8.) Of course, variety is nice, so I don’t mind the delayed opening for records where this is appropriate. Back in more music geeky days when I used to make things like “mix CDs” with my own album art and graphic design and stuff, I had one mix called “Simply Seven” which just highlighted the great Track 7s in rock history. There’s a good number of them. Of course, you can probably come up with a nice mix of any track number should you dig enough, but the seventh spot was particularly easy. Almost any record I picked up, track 7 was one of my favorites.
Missed edit: Actually, looking through my current crop of music in iTunes, it looks like 1, 3, and 6 is even a better selection for picking out the best tracks off any random album.
