*Abbey Road * is my favorite Beatles album. I love the medley of songs that segue into each other. Another great (and much more out-there) example is the first side of Todd Rundgren’s mind-blowing prog epic A Wizard, A True Star.
If I wracked my brain long enough, I might be able to come up with some other examples of medleys. But instead, I’m just going to ask you guys. Can you think of any?
Oh, and just to make things interesting, I’ll also include single-track songs, like Suite: Judy Blue Eyes or Scenes From An Italian Restaurant (or for a more recent example, California One/Youth And Beauty Brigade by The Decemberists) that are made up of several songs that flow into each other.
Lou Reed’s Street Hassle is a pretty sad trio of songs, beginning with the sweet gigolo tale Waltzing Matilda, leading into a possibly unrelated post-overdose bit of nastiness (Street Hassle), and finally ending with the Bruce Springsteen-assisted Slip Away, which seems to be about how badly Matilda (or Lou himself?) misses a guy who robbed her blind.
The three-part song cycle is on his album Street Hassle, which I recommend to any Velvet Underground fans out there.
Jethro Tull’s Minstrel In The Gallery has a sequence of songs that is a medley. It’s pretty much the whole second side of the album as it was originally released on vinyl. It’s my favorite piece of music by Ian Anderson.
One could argue that Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick” and “A Passion Play” are medleys instead of single-album songs. “Thick as a Brick” is especially good.
The original LP of Traffic’s “Mr. Fantasy” album was an interesting variation: the album began with “Paper Sun” and, in the spaces between the grooves you could hear them playing “Paper Sun” between other songs. The final song – “We’re a Fade You Missed This” is a coda to “Paper Sun,” so it’s as if the song were playing all the time the rest of the album is going on.
The A-sides of Queen’s first 5 albums (Queen, Queen 2, Sheer Heart Attack, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races) were medleys. Two, Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera, pulled it off nicely. The rest sounded a little forced.
On second thought, the segue from Take My Breath Away to Far Away on Races is very smooth.
Oh, and the segue from The Prophet’s Song to Love of My Life on the B-side of Opera is so smooth, it’s almost impossible to tell when on song ends and the next begins. EMI decided on the CD to put it where the harp picks up the melody, even though the melody had subtly changed ten to fifteen seconds earlier.
Hah! I was gonna answer B-Boy Bouliabaisse too except most of the songs don’t really segue into each other, but then again, do the ones on the Abbey Road medley (I’ve only heard the entire thing once.)
Two songs off the new (fantastic) The Decemberists album, The Crane Wife: The Island: Come & See/The Landlord’s Daughter/You’ll Not Feel The Drowning and The Crane Wife 1 and 2