Diary of a Madman has a great example of this. You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll has a great fade out solo. I remember reading once that the fade out goes on for another 2 or three minutes. I’d love to hear those last few minutes. Back when I first started playing I used to crank that song to hear the soloy bits at the end. Think I damaged my ears a bit doing that…
Slee
Several of my favorite songs have fade-outs. “God only knows” is my favorite song of all time and I can’t imagine it being any other way. The best way I can describe it in is that the fade out makes the excellence of the song “echo” in your head and body.
I have heard excellent uses of endings too. The Righteous Brothers’ cover of “Ebb Tide” is a great example.
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Nellie McKay**'s Waiter does this, with my favorite part starting right before the fade out with a really cool section change and new lyrical hooks. The first few bars are pre-fade, but then it fades very quickly over the next 4-6, which are incidentally my favorite part of the song. Grrr…
Is that a blow-by-blow account of the last few minutes of Beethoven’s 9th? 
I am gonna swim against the tide here and say that I LOVE fade-outs! I don’t think they’re a cop out at all or that the band is saying that they don’t know how to end the song, as one poster suggested. Sometimes, if you have a really great chorus or “outro” bit of music, it just works to hear it over and over and to stop is just too abrupt an end to the experience of hearing that really cool piece of music. It’s like you get that few seconds in the fade-out to gradually come to terms with the fact that the song is finishing, or something. I’m thinking of songs like those long Red House Painters tracks where you have a really moving chorus that you don’t tire of hearing again and again at the end of the song. As someone who has been in many bands, I can say I find it very artificial sometimes to have to insert token ends to songs that really sound like they should naturally fade out, although obviously you can’t fade out when playing live so you have to come up with some way of ending if you are performing the song.
I love Christine Lavin’s song “What Was I thinking” as it appears on the album of that name. The song ends in a fadeout of not only the refrain, but of Christine Lavin ranting about songs that end in fadeouts. It goes something like this:
“Oh, God, how do I end this song? I know – I’ll go to a fade-out. That’s why so many songs end in fade-outs. They just don’t know how to end them! You think it’s an artistic choice, but it’s just the artist’s not knowing how to end it. Ecxcept for Spanky and Our Gang doing ‘I’d Really Like to Get to Know You’ – that was an artistic choice. But all the other times it’s because they don’t know how to end the song! What? Are you still listening? You must have ears like a dog!”
(By the time you reach this last bit, the fadeout has gotten so quiet you have to crank the volume way up to hear her last line.)
You’re right about “Layla” having a definite end. When I was playing it in my mind I kept hearing the endless coda.
But I’ll stand my ground on “A Day in the Life.” How many people here are old enough to remember the days of non-automatic record players? The chord crashes, yes, but then it fades. And if you didn’t have an automatic, the needle would stay on the groove forever. You allowed the song to fade out for as long as you could stand it. That was a deliberate decision by The Beatles, of course.
Neither specific example matters, though. There are thousands of good fade-outs. There are thousands that stop. It’s all about creating mood. And again harking back to the days of record players, many songs were designed with fade-outs that led seamlessly into the next song. Those were crucial to the mood of many album sides, back when an album side was like a suite of songs. I think that today’s technology has more to do with what you think of fade-outs than their intrinsic merit.
From when I played in a cover band, my bias has been against fade-outs. Of course, my strong preference for music leans towards that which can be played live, so I tend to disfavor many studio effects. But OTOH, we enjoyed coming up with interesting ways to end such songs.
At the other end ofthe extreme, Dire Straits’ put enought endings in Twistin’ by the Pool to make up for any of their other songs that faded out.
Pink Floyd’s Echoes does this on one of the fades between the song’s movements. The funky bass bit with the wailing Gilmour fills in the middle fades when you hear the band getting really interesting and jammy. Fortunately, I have a bootleg live version that blows the studio version away.
I was trying to draw a comparison between the complete acceptance of fade-outs in film with the wide derision of fade-outs in music.
Why is fade-to-black kosher, but fade-to-silence is not?
[hijack]I like the drums on the Live at Pompeii version a lot more. I guess it’s sort of relevant because the ending sort of fades out, too, and I don’t like that as much. But mainly it’s the energy and DSOTM-meets-The Narrow Way sound that make me prefer it, which I shouldn’t, because Echoes is trying to set a beachside, wavy, blissful scene, but whatareyougonnado?
Because, in real life, song performances generally don’t fade and have a definite ending. Pretty much every song until the 20th century had an end of one kind or another.
The movie also has a definite ending, so it’s not analogous to a song that repeatsrepeatsrespeats and fades out.
in a real-life stage performance, the end is often indicated with the curtain dropping. The visual fade-out at the movie is analogous.
I think you’re confused on two counts. First, the issue of fadeout vs. cold ending is a compositional one, not simply a sonic one. The Beatles clearly composed a conclusion to the song as opposed to using the mechanical contrivance of a fadeout to disguise the absence of such a conclusion. Secondly, the Beatles’ intention was certainly not that you “allowed the song to fade out for as long as you could stand it”…which makes no sense anyway, as the chord does not continue to fade in the end groove. The original version of Sgt Pepper, as approved by the Beatles, did not even end with the chord–once the chord had died out completely there was a 20 kHz tone in the runout groove followed by a loop of babbling voices in the end groove–that’s what you listened to for as long as you could stand it if you had a manual turntable. This was removed from the U.S. edition, leaving only silence in the runout, but the Beatles had nothing to do with that decision.
That’s not what Bob Spitz writes in The Beatles:
Spitz is describing a rejected idea for the track ending, which has nothing to do with what ended up on the finished record (either version).
I prefer “real” endings, but fade-outs have their place. Even though it eliminates at least one verse, I like the fade in Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” There’s an ending to that song, they just felt like doing something weird.
On the downside, I’ve heard the original performance that Boz Scaggs’ version of “Loan Me a Dime” was originally about 20 minutes, with a lot more of Duane Allman’s soloing. The album version fades out at 12:30 or something.
I’m still puzzled. How did a rejected idea end up on the finished record?
It didn’t. Spitz is describing the big “Om” sound that was one idea for ending the song. That was rejected in favor of the famous piano chord. Maybe you’re confusing the description of the multi-voiced “Om” sound with the chatter that appeared in the end groove of the original LP (and which appears looped at the end of the CD version, where it is eventually–gasp–faded out!).
“Fire and Rain” is an example of a terrible fade out. Meandering until it finally dies. That is for me the classic bad fade out.
Funny, I was just thinking about this today as I was listening to “Hard to Explain” by The Strokes on the radio. I love they way that songs just ends. But it’s not always the best way to end a song.