I just finished listening to Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night”. I noticed that the song didn’t end on a note. The band just keeps playing as the music fades until you can’t hear it anymore.
Was this an 80’s thing? BC I don’t notice that so much anymore.
Hardly an 80’s thing. Consider how long this tune lasts.
It goes back further than the 80s–the Beatles did it, as did Stevie Wonder, just to name two. But you’re right that it’s not done as much anymore.
This 2014 article from Slate notes that fade-outs started declining in the 1990s, and aren’t done very much these days. They blame our current short attention span, and the ability of the iPod to skip to the next song, rather than sitting through the slow fade-out, for the change.
I always assumed it was for disc jockies to have time for mindless chatter between songs.
I really don’t like it, even though some great songs do it. Maybe I’m amazed, for example. It doesn’t seem to be related to attention span, the song could end at the same time with just fading away
Fade-out immediately makes me think of ELO. Did they have any songs that that did not fade out?
That’s probably not the best example. It has an ending: a single epic chord that is allowed to die out naturally. There are better examples of a proper fadeout of the kind the OP is talking about—“Baby You’re A Rich Man Too” springs to mind.
Plenty:
Rockaria
Do Ya
Tightrope (most of the songs on New World Record, actually)
Well, the gauntlet has been thrown. I’m off to compile a list – don’t wait up.
I knew some noble Doper would take up the challenge! What would you guess the fade / no-fade ratio is?
Until I can do more research – 4 non-fades to 1 fade-out per album. I’ll give you this: they were the master of “gimmick” endings (see “So Fine” into “Livin’ Thing”).
It’s definitely not just an 80s thing.
Sparks kind of spoofed it, in their song I Predict. Their line was “And this song will fade out… I predict” repeated at the end, but only the vocals faded. The track kept going and came to a regular end.
As others have said, the fade-out was frequent in the 60s and 70s. What’s much rarer is a fade-in. The Beatles did it on “Eight Days A Week”. Sadly, the remastered version from “1” changed the intro, and that’s the only version I can find on youtube, but on the “Beatles For Sale” version, the fade-in is still intact.
Sacrilege!
I zoned out there. Can you summarize what you wrote after? kthx
Fade outs used to be the primary ending. Very hard to replicate in concert. But probably better for radio jocks to blend from one song to another. Or talk too much.
Fade out songs used to be weird on TV variety shows, because the band is lip-syncing to the record, and if the record fades out, it looks fake.
Then you get the rare cold ending song like Van Halen’s cover of Oh Pretty Woman that ends with a slam so quick it can catch a DJ off guard. The copy in our campus radio station had a hand-written note “this song ends REAL COLD”.
Christine Lavin parodied this with her song “What was I thinking? (This Song Has No End)” Near the end of the studio version, as her chorus keeps repeating “What was I thinking – this song has no end” and fading out, she keeps up a running commentary that keeps getting quieter and quieter, so you have to keep cranking up the volume to hear her. But it’s worth it.
It goes something like this;
*What was I thinking? how can I end this? *
I know! We’ll go to a fadeout! That’s what all those other songs do when they can’t figure out how to end it – they just fade out!
Except “Like to get to know you” by Spanky and our gang – that was an artistic choice
But all the others were just because they couldn’t figure out how to end it.
Are you still listening? You must have ears like a dog!
lol. That’s awesome.
I’m pretty sure that fade outs were the norm from the 1950s until the 1980s. For example, Music, Music, Music from 1950 by Teresa Brewer:
I think what ended it was that radio stations wanted to keep things moving, and didn’t want any “dead air”. So today, instead of keeping the fade outs, I’ve noticed that most oldies stations truncate the songs so that they no longer have the full fade out, and jump directly to the next promo or song.
One of the few “artistic” fade-outs (as opposed to “how are we gonna end this?” fadeouts) I can think of is “I’ll Be Back” by the Beatles – the song switches between A major and A minor throughout the fade without ever resolving on one or the other, making for a harmonically ambiguous ending.
A Horse with No Name exemplifies that for me. If it didn’t eventually fade out it would never end. I don’t know the names but I remember old timey type songs before Rock was popular ended that way sometimes.
“The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” by Traffic fades in and fades out at the end.
They also continued a fade throughout their album Mr Fantasy, where you keep hearing excerpts from “Paper Sun” in the grooves between the tracks until the final track, “We’re a Fade, You Missed This” adds an extra coda.
Thank heavens. I absolutely hate the “Let’s repeat the chorus (or worse, a couple of words) a hundred times at the end of a song.”
A friend’s band, as far back as the 70s, perfected the “live fade”, where the guitars would start muting the strings little by little, AND keep strumming but pull their hands away from the strings until they were pantomiming acoustic guitars. It was easy to just keep turning the other instruments down, but I just loved that the drummer would LOOK LIKE he was hitting the drums as hard as ever. He started pulling his punches, til he was barely touching the drums.
The scary thing is that maybe only a quarter of the audience would get the joke. The others? Just used to a fade-out, I guess…