I can only assume that, unless the musician does it themselves, there is someone paid a lot of money to put the tracks in a studio album in a precise order for ideal listening.
How is this accomplished?
Good question. I suspect, but don’t know, that…
…in many cases, it’s the album’s producer who selects the final track order (and, at least in some cases, decides which songs will actually be included on the album).
…there’s no one specific way this is determined. It’s more of an art than a science, and some artists and/or producers take more pains with it than others.
Just my observations. Take your three strongest songs and choose the one that best reflects the mood or theme of the album and make it side one, track one. The strongest of the remaining two goes at the end of side two and the remaining one goes at the end of side one. Fill in side one with the strongest remaining songs and then dump the remainder (weakest) on side two before your strong ender. That’s basically the formula used by George Martin for the Beatles.
I sent this question to my friend, a fairly famous Grammy-winning recording artist, and she said:
Wow. I can’t ask for a more authoritative answer than that. Thank you for doing that!
I’ve often wondered, in a chicken-or-egg sort of way. There have been some variations between vinyl and cassette and later, CD but…
What’s the first song on the eponymous album “Boston?”
More than a Feeling
The first song on Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” is “Second Hand News.” What follows it?
Dreams
The first two songs on “Led Zeppelin IV” are “Black Dog” and “Rock and Roll.” What is third?
Battle of Evermore
Is there a rhyme or reason? For the first spoiler, I like the sort of fade-in. For the FM tune, I like how it comes out strong, then becomes pensive. For Zepp, I just wondered if you knew or thought it was logical etc.
One album I particularly like is “Meet the Knack.” What a great opening track, everybody just playing the hell out of their instruments and having a blast…then leading into a heartsick ballad. The sync isn’t great but at least it joins the two tunes, which I was having a hard time finding. Such a wonderful album. RIP Bruce Gary, who was a hell of a drummer, and Doug Fieger, the lead man.
It’s not exactly the same thing, but here’s John Cusack describing how to make a mix tape:
Springsteen’s Born To Run tells a diurnal story. Song order definitely matters.
I think most serious artists put a lot of thought into the order. Among other considerations they strive for balance - alternating loud with softer songs, faster with slower, etc.
The gold standard for song ordering, to me, is the Beatles Abbey Road medley. I couldn’t imagine those songs in any other order.
I find this an interesting topic and often ponder the choices made. Another brilliant example is Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom.
mmm
This is a question whose answer has varied over time.
In the olden days, the answer was always the producer. Usually, it was thought best to put the punchiest song, or the song most likely to be used as a single, first. Whether the order of the others mattered was not necessarily a consideration. A few producers sought to create moods, as with some of Sinatra’s albums, but most albums were stuffed with quickly recorded noise to fill out space around the hits or just to deliver a constant background presence. Albums were likely to be recorded in no more than a day. The early Beatles albums were done this fast.
The record world changed in an eyeblink. By the end of the 1960s albums by top groups were constructed to be complete performances, with all the songs important, and placement closely monitored by the artists. Lots of clashes between producers, artists, and record companies are known because someone thought that the ordering should be different.
All this depended absolutely on an album having two distinct sides (or, very occasionally, more). People still talk about favorite album sides and whether the first song on side two is worthy of leading off a side or if the last song ends an album with the proper conclusion. Sgt. Pepper’s became the most famous album of the 60s partly because of the “endless chord” that closed “A Day in the Life.” Side 1 of Van Morrison’s Moondance may be the best album side of all, but it doesn’t feature “Moondance” first. The side starts and ends with the Irish countryside water imagery of “And it Stoned Me” and “Into the Mystic.” Yet stories also abound about groups needing a smash song and coming up with one only at the last moment after every other song was recorded.
When recording moved to CDs, the notion of sides was pushed to the background. The added length (LPs topped out at 40 minutes, CDs at 65) often meant that piles of unneeded studio work was cranked out to justify the higher prices. The fact that CD players sometimes had a random button meant that artists couldn’t ever be sure that the works would be played in the order they preferred. Order mattered, but it couldn’t take precedence as it once had.
The modern non-physical ways of listening to music dropped order even farther down the chain. Some artists for some albums make order a priority. But many artists even today are creatures of producers who make all the decisions. Based on what? Something, anything, everything, nothing. It’s not a science, not even an art, and maybe not even commerce. It’s like air.
It was standard in the recording industry for years that the first song is something up-tempo and peppy and with a good hook to catch people’s attention. It was a bid deal when The Band started Music from Big Pink with “Tears of Rage,” a slow, majestic ballad.
There’s also a trend toward ending an album with a strong finishing number. The Who were masters at this.
One of the bands I follow just finished putting together an album. After deciding which songs would go on the album, they said they listened to the entire song list, then changed the order, listened to the entire song list again, etc., until they didn’t feel they needed to change anything again.
So it consumes a lot of time.
Another example that comes to mind is Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. The album works, and almost certainly was conceived, as a continuous emotional narrative.
I’m sure it does, sometimes. Maybe the artist even envisioned them that way from the git-go.
My default assumption for many years was that a musical group got together some songs and recorded them. Back in the day I gather they were separate camps. Songwriters wrote songs, others recorded the songs. But there was also that singer-songwriter phase. If the muse visited enough times, we have enough songs for an album so let’er rip!
A lot of the Beatles early stuff was about dating so they were thematic. Later, the singer-songwriter confessional thing brought “Rumours,” which had songs that related to various dramas within the band told from various points of view. The songs couldn’t help but be interrelated.
Has anybody else experienced a mini-trauma when the sequence on one medium is different from another? IIRC once or twice, you might get an album and you get used to that order, but when you buy the CD they’ve reordered something? I think the Beatles (White Album) did that.
Forgot to post the link…my bad.
I get that when a computerized radio station plays “Heartbreaker” without immediately transitioning into “Living Loving Maid.” Very jarring.
Some stations played Pure Prairie League’s “Fallin’ in and out” before “Amie.” I think that’s how it was on the original LP. They were so well matched—I thought they were one song. When I got the CD (“Best of”) they actually swapped the order. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, people?! Sure, you can program a disc to play in whatever order, but c’mon!
As far as I know, there are no “alternative orderings” of the White Album, but I’d be interested if anyone has evidence to the contrary. Capitol Records in the USA did release the earlier Beatles albums in different versions, with not just different orderings but different song selections.
In the 8-track era, it wasn’t unusual for the tracks of an album to be rearranged on the eight-track tape release, to try to get all four programs the same length and avoid a stretch of silence or a …KaChunk! in the middle of a song.
When albums have been released in different mediums (e.g. LP vs cassette vs CD), sometimes some versions would have extra songs (bonus tracks). These would most often appear at the end, but not always, and it could be disconcerting to be listening to a familiar album and have a song come on that you don’t expect.
My first exposure to the Kinks’ album Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire was a cassette that I found in a discount bin that was apparently an import (from Spain). Years later, when I bought the album on CD, I found out that the order of the songs on the cassette I was familiar with was not the official track order. And I’m still not sure which order I prefer. (IMHO the official order works better lyrically, but the alternate order on the cassette I had may work better musically.)
If you scroll down and click on the middle image of the cassette box and mouse over to read enlarged but upside down listings. Up to “…Me and My Monkey” it’s like the CD I have.
Then the tape goes to “Helter Skelter” and my CD goes to “Sexy Sadie” and that naturally causes other things to be out of whack.
Hmm, interesting. I originally has the White Album on cassette, and the track order on my tape may have matched the one shown on the tape in your link, but I don’t remember for sure. If so, somehow I never noticed the difference.
I’m pretty sure the ones we had were opaque white. We listened to it a lot and thought, ‘These crappy pre-recorded tapes probably aren’t even chromium dioxide. Let’s get the vinyl and some really good Maxells to put it on.’
In the old days, I think they tried to balance the timings. If you’re pre-recording cassettes, you’d want 22 minutes on each side rather than 21 minutes and 23 minutes. If you did it that way you’d have two minutes of silence at the end of the short side.
Tangent: Have you heard this album? George and Giles took the old masters and got created for Cirque. They deconstruct and morph songs together.
Listen to the intro and you think, ‘Hey, it’s Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?’ No. And that outro: Hey Bulldog. Talk about messing with your head.
George Harrison apparently had some say in the ordering on White Album and Abbey Road getting “While my Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Here Comes the Sun” in the seventh position; his favorite number. I wondered if he carried it through with his solo albums, making his favorite songs Track 7. If true, his favorite songs weren’t the ones that most people remember those albums for.