The Proper Way to Listen
The Proper Way to Listen
Don't tell me what I should do!
When I got to college, my randomly-assigned roommate and I became fast friends. One of the first things we bonded over was music. We both loved The Lumineers’ eponymous debut record that was released the year before our higher education began. But one thing my new friend said left me disturbed. He listened to the album on shuffle!
Over the course of our college career, I did convince him that albums should be listened to in the order the artist intended. I can imagine I told him that you wouldn’t like the Mona Lisa as much if you cut it up and then randomly glued it back together. It was the artist’s job to mediate our experience. Maybe. A decade later, you’ll still never catch me listening to an album on shuffle. But you will catch me questioning what it means to properly enjoy art. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this page.
She’s in the Class A, B, C-Team
I have a conspiracy theory for how Ed Sheeran became one of the world’s most popular artists. It centers on his first hit, “The A Team”. No, this conspiracy doesn’t purport any nefarious activity surrounding how the folksy ballad about a sex worker with a drug problem became a sleeper hit. It has to do with the unexpected boost that the song would get by being played from an iPod in certain situations.
For years, Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team” was the first song that appeared on my iPod when the songs were sorted alphabetically. Because of that, if I ever plugged my iPod into something that would cause it to automatically start playing, I would hear the opening chords to Sheeran’s somber number. In fact, that’s why “The A Team” was the most played song by a wide margin among the first ten songs to appear alphabetically on my iPod. Most of those plays were unintentional. My silly conspiracy is that the red-headed Brit had his song beaten into the heads of people because of this alphabetical accident.
In one sense, alphabetical listening is mostly a quirk of our technological age. Nobody, for example, was listening to Al Jolson’s songs sorted alphabetically 80 years ago. Even if they wanted to, there was no way to really do it. Computers just make sorting objects alphabetically easy. But the contemporary ubiquity of alphabetical order obscures the fact that starting with A and working your way to Z is actually quite radical.
In his book Index, A History of the, Dennis Duncan recounts the surprisingly riveting history of book indexes. Along the way, he captures why organizing ideas alphabetically initially met resistance. Why, for example, would you want to list “Aardvark” near the beginning of an encyclopedia? It likely isn’t something people are looking up often. Shouldn’t you list something a bit more important first?
Alphabetical order is radical because it pays no mind to importance. It allows the listener, reader, or viewer to mediate their own experience, to dive in and find what they want rather than what someone else tells them they should want. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should sit down and listen to an album alphabetically by the track names. That would be insane. What I’m suggesting is that when we only experience art mediated by the creator of said art, we can miss things.
In the graphic above, I’ve taken The Beatles 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour and sorted the track list as it appeared on the record, along with in five additional ways: alphabetically, from shortest to longest length, shuffled on Spotify, chronologically by the date recording commenced, and from least to most popular across streaming platforms. Listening to these alternative track lists, unlocks new insights that might not be obvious from the actual order.
Listening by track length hammers home that there isn’t a ton of variation in how long the songs are on this record. In fact, they all range between 2-minutes-and-16-seconds and 4-minutes-and-35-seconds.
Listening on shuffle illustrates that there is some logical consistency to the track list that breaks down when ignored. For example, on the original track list the droning quality of “Blue Jay Way” works really well after the atmosphere created by “Flying”. When shuffled, “Blue Jay Way” comes after the bombast of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man”, a much worse transition.
Listening chronologically demonstrates why “I Am The Walrus”, “The Fool on the Hill”, “Blue Jay Way”, and “Flying” all have a similar sonic pallet. Recording for each of those songs commenced in a matter of three days.
Listening by contemporary popularity shows us that the B side of the record has remained more relevant in the public consciousness, which is fascinating given that that entire side was released as singles.
The next time I sit down to listen to the Magical Mystery Tour, I will likely start with track one and let it play for the next half hour until “All You Need Is Love” fades out. But I will also remind myself that a platonic form of listening does not exist. Maybe shuffling an album seems wrong because we should let the artist mediate our listening rather than some black-box technology. At the same time, the album itself was a technological innovation in the 1950s. By insisting an artist’s intention must live within that paradigm, we are also having our listening mediated by technology, albeit a much older one.
The important thing, of course, is just to listen, to keep your ears open to new ideas. Track one of a record is a great place to begin to do that. But once you’ve spun that record as the artist intended a few times, don’t be afraid to pick it apart and stitch it back together. You might just discover something that you missed the first time.
A New One
"Flyer Than U" by Laila!
2024 - R&B
There was only so much space in a record store. Because of that, if a song wasn’t selling it would quickly be moved to make room for what was. After that, it was hard for a song to have a second life. The internet started to dismantle this idea. TikTok finished the job. Now, songs from years ago will frequently pop off on TikTok whether they were initially hits or not. Laila! is lucky that’s the case.
In 2023, Laila Smith recorded a slow jam in her bedroom called “Like That!” It did nothing. Then a few months ago, people started dancing to it on TikTok. Since then, it’s been used in over 820k posts on the platform. Rather than rest on her laurels, the young beatmaker has kept grinding. Last month, she released a two-pack that included “Not My Problem” and “Flyer Than U”. Though both are enjoyable R&B numbers, I keep returning to the latter for the beat drop that happens about 30 seconds into the song.
An Old One
"Downtown Train" by Tom Waits
1985 - Rock
During my sophomore year of college, I discovered Steve Winwood’s song “Valerie” and Tom Waits’ song “Downtown Train” in a matter of weeks. Because of that, they ended up back-to-back on my Currently Spinning playlist, which captures songs that are new to me. Oddly, I found that the songs worked really well one after another.
This was unexpected. They have wildly different sonic pallets, Winwood’s crystalline vocal tone over some synth riffs standing in stark contrast to Waits’ cigarette-coated growl and minimalist rock production. This discovery was only possible because I was willing to go against my own advice and pick apart two albums and put them together in a way that neither artist intended.
Shout out to the paid subscribers who allow this newsletter to exist. Subscribers get four additional newsletters each month and access to our archive. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!
Recent Paid Subscriber Interviews: Royalty-Free Music • Microphone Engineer • Spotify’s Former Data Guru • Running an Independent Venue • John Legend Collaborator • Broadway Star • What It’s Like to Go Viral • Adele Collaborator
Recent Newsletters: What Happened to Instrumentals? • I Miss You, Buddy Holly • Blockbuster Nostalgia • Pop Songs & Baby Names • Recorded Music is a Hoax • On Dying Young • Selling Out
Want to hear the music that I make? Check out my latest single “Late Nite Kicks” wherever you stream music.
Very interesting piece, Chris.
I think it might be like reading a series of books out of order, say Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. You can do it as each book is able to stand alone, but you're going to miss some key information or not appreciate it to its full potential that first time through. Some musical artists also have a larger story or creative arc or message which is lost if you do it out of order (like rock operas or I'm betting Rush albums). So I tend to follow your strategy of accompanying the creator on the intended journey the first time through, then go off on different paths and do what I wish with the individual songs after that.
The "A Team" was also an iTunes Free Single of the Week, which is how it came to be first on my iPod in the first place!