There was this discussion to know how long the human ear was really receptive to the music. A 74 minute CD is too long. We thought about making two CDs, 35 minutes each... But the songs need to breathe.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.
People often forget this - a vinyl album could only contain a maximum of 20 minutes per side!
Think back to the early rock n' roll records, and the average record length in the '50s - and well into the '60s - was two and a half minutes. It's very hard to put that much songwriting into two and a half minutes.
You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.
Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America.
I mean, Beatles songs were two and a half minutes long, and they're fantastic.
If a song is longer than three and a half minutes, it'll need something to keep you entertained.
I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically.
The great thing about vinyl is that if you wanted to get a decent-sounding cut, you could really only have 20 minutes max on each side.
We were interested in this notion of compression- a lot of the songs were really short so that you'd absorb them in memory rather than when you're actually hearing them.
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