# I'm a whole album kinda guy **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** music\ **Created:** [April 29, 2022, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685 "2022-04-29T17:18:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/1 "2022-04-29T17:18:47Z")
I’m a music fan and have been since I was young. But I have never been a “singles” guy. I want to dig into an album and digest the whole album. There are albums that click with you from play one, and there are others that take a few spins before you can understand what’s going on. In the olden days when I was broke, buying 1-2 tapes each month, and then later CDs, was the highlight of month…a couple new albums to put into rotation. I hated when I spent that precious money on ones that fell flat. Now with Spotify and other streaming services, I have endless albums to explore. But I still typically have 4-6 on constant rotation at a time. Right now, my rotation is: - Jack White, _Fear of the Dawn_ - Wasn’t a fan the first listen. Now love it. - Spoon, _Lucifer on the Sofa_ - Fan from the start. Love Spoon. - Coriky, _Coriky_ - Not sure how I missed this when it was released in 2020 since I am a fan of all things Ian MacKaye, but love it. Clean Kill is a brutal song that I love. The whole album is great. - King Giz, \* Omnium Gatherum\* - This just dropped and it’s a lot to digest and I haven’t had time to dig into it. Looking forward to it though since I’m a fan. - Black Sabbath, _Sabotage_ - I grew up with the first four albums, later got Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, but never got to this one so it was great to have a “new” album to dig in (I’d of course heard _Am I Going Insane_ . I guess I can add Heaven and Hell (Dio) to this list as it’s in rotation now as well…I like it but Sabotage is better. I’ll explore more later. This shows there are probably a lot of older albums out there waiting for me to find. I do have some playlists for times I need background music and don’t have time to change the music (working in the shop or outside), but most times I’m listening to albums. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/2 "2022-04-29T18:37:43Z")
I also enjoy full albums. In Jazz, there is a mood that permeates an album. If I’m listening to Miles Davis, I want to hear the flow from one tune to the next, all Miles Davis. Likewise, if the artist is Paul Desmond, I want to hear his work. Seventies-era rock albums that were written with the “album side” in mind work great. Whole albums is the only way to properly consume _Pink Floyd_, and I wouldn’t listen to _The Who_ any other way. What do you do about artists who are a mixed bag? I really like Elton John’s hits, but feel that his albums have a lot of filler (IMHO), so I gravitate toward “Greatest Hits” compilations in those cases. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/3 "2022-04-29T18:42:52Z")
I am too. Well, I certainly used to be. Most of my music listening involved listening to whole albums straight through (especially during the years when most of my music was on cassettes). When I heard a great song on the radio, my reaction wasn’t “I want to hear _that_ song over and over and over again” but “I want to hear more _like_ that. I want to hear the _context_ for that song. I want to see what else that band/artist has done.” Recently, though, I don’t have as much music-listening time, so I don’t have time to listen to whole albums nearly as often as I used to. So nowadays I’ll often throw a few albums onto a playlist, shuffle the playlist, and listen to as many songs as I have time for. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/4 "2022-04-29T18:44:48Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > What do you do about artists who are a mixed bag? I really like Elton John’s hits, but feel that his albums have a lot of filler (IMHO), so I gravitate toward “Greatest Hits” compilations in those cases. Some albums definitely work best when you listen to them straight through. Other albums, I like all or almost all the songs, but they don’t necessarily have to be heard together or in order. And other albums, I like some of the songs but others are just filler—although it’s not immediately obvious whether the songs that don’t immediately grab me are filler or just need several listens to grow on me. ---
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/5 "2022-04-29T18:49:38Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > Recently, though, I don’t have as much music-listening time, so I don’t have time to listen to whole albums nearly as often as I used to. So nowadays I’ll often throw a few albums onto a playlist, shuffle the playlist, and listen to as many songs as I have time for. This is also true - Sometimes I only have 15 minutes to listen. I still tend to pick an album and listen to a bit of it. But if not, I do have my curated playlists to fall back on. ---
**Author:** ![dirtball](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dirtball/32/18772_2.png) [@dirtball](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dirtball)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/6 "2022-04-29T19:12:00Z")
All my teenage years and a bit of my early twenties took place in the seventies, and that was the period when, for rock and rollers, the album blossomed into full maturity as the basic unit of music collecting. You did have a few album-oriented bands in the sixties, especially the later part of the decade, but as I recall, the prevailing attitude about LPs back then was that they were what you bought if you liked a couple of a band’s singles enough to want to check out more of their music, which on the album could be described as “filler,” although they obviously wouldn’t market it that way. Being a somewhat bookish, geeky suburban kid drawn to weird shit, I was square in the crosshairs of the prog rock acts of the time. And a lot of those guys weren’t kidding around when it came to what you could do with the album format. So it was along about the time when I started buying a significant amount of music with my own money that I became conditioned to think of my preferences in terms of albums. Thank God for used record stores! I could cash my paycheck on Friday afternoon, take forty dollars on a shopping trip making the rounds of something like four different stores, and come home with a pretty good haul. The album mindset got hard-coded into me, and it persists to this day. ---
**Author:** ![alovem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b38774/32.png) [@alovem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alovem)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/7 "2022-04-29T19:17:00Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > In Jazz, there is a mood that permeates an album. That’s especially true of jazz and other genres in which a central artist will record with different musicians from one “album” to the next. It’s very interesting to listen to the chemistry of different line-ups. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/8 "2022-04-29T19:19:55Z")
I’ll be the odd man out. There aren’t a half dozen albums I like every song on. Everybody comes up with a clunker. And really, everybody has half a dull album most of the time. I do have hundreds of albums, but I started culling my favorite tracks back in the 70s when I first got a tape recorder and never looked back. Still rather listen to those tapes than any album. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/9 "2022-04-29T19:39:01Z")
Great point from my mid-30s kid, who said something like… > Digital music is background music. But when I pick out an LP to play, it’s a much more ‘intentional’ action. So I really listen. When I decide to play a ‘record’, there’s a reverent ‘quiet time’ while I’m pulling it out of its sleeve, putting it on the platter, dripping solution onto my vintage Discwasher, holding it just _so_ with just the right pressure, then brushing off all the dust. Then picking up the tomearm and (manually) placing it on the vinyl. By then, I’m ready to devote at least one side’s worth of time to that artist. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/10 "2022-04-29T20:00:35Z")
These days I have taken “Whole Album” to an entirely strange level. I collect [Seeburg 1000 Background Music](https://seeburg1000.com/seeburg-1000-bms-background-music-system/) records from the 60s and 70s. I have several hundred of them. Each one has approximately 20 songs on each side and was intended to be played in a stack of 25 in the machine, hence “1000” in the name. And that’s precisely how I listen to them: all day long, as whole uninterrupted sides, as they were first heard by shoppers, restaurant patrons, and hotel guests in the 1960s. I don’t want to put too much wear on my machine (the stylii are extremely rare), so I have ripped all of them to MP3 and I have a jukebox program that plays full sides randomly all day long as I work. And yes, it’s absolutely pure background music, and I enjoy it. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/11 "2022-04-29T20:56:55Z")
I grew up with 12" extended play singles as the pinnacle of recording excellence, like those put out by Mute and Factory and similar British indie releases. So albums were a nice to have, but a good 12", that’s the _chef’s kiss_ of music. ---
**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/12 "2022-04-29T23:16:26Z")
A while back I realized that I had, with the advent of digital music, stopped listening to albums. And for decades, when I was younger, it had been my default way of listening to my music. At least for the first few listens to most albums and for some albums, always. To recreate that spirit of discovery I downloaded the NME 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, randomized the list in Excel and began listening to the albums complete. My intention was to do one a day but I haven’t stuck to my schedule. Plenty of interesting discoveries along the way - there are quite a few bands whose popular stuff I don’t really like but whose entire album I do. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/13 "2022-04-29T23:23:26Z")
> [@don\_t\_ask](#): > > there are quite a few bands whose popular stuff I don’t really like but whose entire album I do. Care to share some examples? ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/14 "2022-04-29T23:41:05Z")
There are only a few dozen albums that I know of, though probably many more, which were made with such care and craftsmanship that I prefer the album to just the best singles. Some follow themes or build on previous songs or somehow result in a loss of substance if a part is taken from the whole. But this is not the norm. So I tend to disagree except when I don’t. **What is the last album or CD made, do tou think, where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts? Lemonade? Something by Tool?** ---
**Author:** ![epbrown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e47774/32.png) [@epbrown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/epbrown)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2022, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/15 "2022-04-30T03:32:28Z")
There’s almost no artist I like that’s done an entire album that I enjoy, and typically it’s early stuff. The Cars’ first one, Alanis Morrisette’s third, H2O by Hall and Oates, the first Suicidal Tendencies album. I was pretty happy when it became possible to just buy the songs I enjoy. ---
**Author:** ![Wolf333](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolf333/32/3460_2.png) [@Wolf333](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wolf333)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2022, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/16 "2022-04-30T03:38:09Z")
One reason I keep my Apple Music sub is that it is easy to queue up albums without making a new playlist. I will sometimes listen to an artist’s catalogue in chronological order\*, or some albums by different artists that are connected in some way. \*Tonight it’s King Buffalo, in reverse order. ---
**Author:** ![Inigo\_Montoya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inigo_montoya/32/124_2.png) [@Inigo\_Montoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inigo_Montoya)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2022, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/17 "2022-04-30T10:54:46Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > Whole albums is the only way to properly consume _Pink Floyd_ , and I wouldn’t listen to _The Who_ any other way. _The Who_ are why I became an album guy. There were a few great singles on _Tommy_ that prompted me to get the vinyl. But upon getting through the double album I caught on to the idea of “context” and realized there really aren’t any singles on _Tommy_ any more than your favorite chapter out of Lord of the Rings is a stand-alone book. Pink Floyd turned me on to the idea of an album being a mood generator, and in that regard it became hard to hear even pop albums by bands like _The Cars_ as a collection of singles & filler. So now I hear even the album clunkers and try and get into the mindset of the band that recorded them, often to re-understand what they were about and come to love the clunkers more than what got air play. ---
**Author:** ![Mean\_Mr.Mustard](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mean_mr.mustard/32/3865_2.png) [@Mean\_Mr.Mustard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mean_Mr.Mustard)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2022, 11:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/18 "2022-04-30T11:29:29Z")
> [@don\_t\_ask](#): > > …I downloaded the NME 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, randomized the list in Excel and began listening to the albums complete… I love this idea. How would I go about finding the list in a format that would be agreeable to being copied/pasted into Excel? mmm ---
**Author:** ![dirtball](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dirtball/32/18772_2.png) [@dirtball](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dirtball)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2022, 11:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/19 "2022-04-30T11:47:56Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#): > > **What is the last album or CD made, do tou think, where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts? Lemonade? Something by Tool?** I can name a lot of albums I’m happy to listen to all the way through, with not the slightest urge to skip a track. But that’s not the same thing as “the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts,” isn’t it? In fact, if someone wanted to point out that “I’m not moved to skip past such and such a track” sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, I’d have to concede the point. (Yet it does speak to the idea of someone being “a whole album kinda guy,” inasmuch as it makes listening to the whole album possible.) Certainly it’s not the last album made that answers “whole is greater” question, what with its fifty-plus-year age, but the first title that comes to mind for me is _Trout Mask Replica_. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2022, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685/21 "2022-04-30T13:03:35Z")
When I finally gave up on fixing my old turntable and bought a new one, it’d been thirty years since I’d played a record. So I thought “Which albums do I HAVE to listen to in order?” And went out and bought Abbey Road. (and Charlie Brown’s Christmas Album because it was just after Thanksgiving). [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-a-whole-album-kinda-guy/963685.md?page=2)