While listening to the radio the other day, the thought occurred to me that a large proportion of modern recorded popular music seems to have no real “ending” as such–instead, a given musical phrase or lyric is repeated endlessly as the volume just sort of fades out. I can’t help but suspect that people raised outside the influence of contemporary Western-style recorded pop music* must find this “non-ending” device to be fairly odd. How did this tradition get started? Is there a point in the history of recorded music when it suddenly became fashionable to “fade out” at the end of songs? Was there a single influential group or recording studio that originated this technique?
It seems like it would make just as much sense to have a song “fade in” at the beginning, and yet most musicians seem to prefer some sort of definitive start to their songs. Why, then, the big fadeout at the end rather than a proper closure, such as music intended to be performed “live” has?
*assuming that there are such people anywhere in the world anymore.
“Key to the Highway” on the Derek and the Dominos album fades in, by the way.
It’s been around since the early '60s. On “The Cough Song” which is on the bootleg album, Dylan is playing the Nashville Skyline Rag, and then starts to cough.
He say “That’s the end, it fades out,”
and Bob Johnson says
“Thanks a lot. I’ll make a note here ‘fade at cough’.”
I think the real reason is not to write an ending, though.
I wondered if this might be the case. So, to reanswer your question, I would think that the band just starts fading out until one designated band member plays the “hey guys, time to end the song” riff or drum roll or whatever.
I think the best justification for the fade out I’ve heard is that it gives the impression of timelessness, of the music going on forever. This kinda makes sense for songs like “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (Billy Joel), which ends with a fade of:
We didn’t start the fire…
It was always burning since the world’s been turning…
The song’s about the endless fire of revolutionaries and it makes sense that the music would never really end.
Of course, I’m sure that a lot of the time, “timelessness” may just be an ad hoc excuse for not writing an ending, as people have already noted
Goes back a damn site further than that. I remember on some of my parents’ old 78 rpm records the songs faded out. Those were from the 30s, and since radio didn’t get into playing records in a big way until the late 1940s, it’s more probably a record company convention that radio just picked up.
I like its cousin, the desconstructive ending, where the musicians fade out or stop one by one until only one element is heard. The Beatles’ psychedelic Tomorrow Never Knows ends this way, with only a rollicking tack piano remaining at the fadeout.
Mike Oldfield’s epic Tubular Bells grandly announces each instrument toward a swelling climax (“Two slightly distorted guitars! Mandolin!”), then draws them away until all that remains are a female choir and acoustic guitar, then just the guitar.
Upon further reflection on the OP: The fadeout convention proably came out when songwriters moved from writing “standards”, to be performed by live performers, and with an eye on sheet music sales, to writing for a particular artist and a particular recording. In other words, the shift of music from a live medium to a recorded medium.
As kunilou said, the shift in American radio programming in the 1940s from primarily live music to playing recorded music was probably influential in that paradigm change. (And if you are further curious why that happened, part of it had to do with the settlement of a royalties contract dispute between the record companies and the American Federation of Musicians, after a recording strike that lasted two years.)
This is an aspect that I hadn’t been aware of, and now I’m wondering if I hadn’t been thinking about the question the wrong way round. If I had been forced to hypothesize, I would have guessed that the fadeout tradition had possibly originated as an artifact from the recording of live, public performances of jazz and similar music: that perhaps musicians back then, as now, might have often wound up a number with an extended free-form coda (or whatever the hell you call it when a guitarist noodles endlessly at the finish of a performance). Thus, the fadeout would have been a convenient technique for packaging these recordings for radio play and distribution, and eventually the convention came to signify “live and spontaneous” music, even to the point of ultimately being adopted by studio-recorded musicians.
But based on the observations of kunilou and Walloon, it seems that the opposite is more likely to be true; that the fadeout tradition was established by the songwriters themselves, as a result of the decline of live radio music.
Unfortunately, I have a far less than encyclopedic familiarity with the history of recorded music. It would be interesting to know what the earliest song specifically written to fade out was, and what musical genre it represented.
It was very far from being a convention in the 30s - I must have heard thousands of pop records from that era, and can think of only a handful that used the “board fade” (a term that originated in radio, BTW - you turn a dial on the control board and fade out the program).
The earliest example I have on hand of a board fade is a rendition of Forty Second Street from 1933 where the band (Don Bestor’s) just plays stop time quarter notes under sound effects, cop whistle, trolley bell, car horn etc. Funnily enough, they didn’t quite pot down the mic enough, so if you listen closely you can actually hear the band stop playing…
I read somewhere that the fadeout was either introduced (or popularized) by jukeboxes - the companies behind the jukeboxes, rather. It was to create the impression that you hadn’t heard the entire song, and would be more likely to play more music.
I’ve tried to look up a cite, but Google mostly returns audio software pages…
