Can I Get an Encore, Do You Want More?

Every show has an encore, right?

Earlier this year, the New York Times published a list of the best books of the 21st century. That list had no books about music. To rectify that, I’ve been polling artists, critics, and fans about their favorite music books released in the last 24 years. I’d love for you to fill out the survey below, so we can find the best books around.

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Can I Get an Encore, Do You Want More?

By Chris Dalla Riva

Once a month, I take some time to answer musical questions that readers send in. (If you’ve got a question, click here and I’ll try to answer it this month.) These questions are usually fairly straightforward and have definitive answers. But occasionally a question sticks with me even after I compose an answer. That happened this month when the wonderful writer

Monia Ali

asked me a fascinating question: “I’d love to know more about the history of the encore. When did it start? Why is it now standard for encores to not even be a surprise?”

The crux of my answer was that the encore “was a solution to the problem of music not being as readily available in the pre-recorded era.” If you wanted to hear a song again in 1855, you had to ask someone to do it again. Nevertheless, the encore we have come to know — where an artist walks offstage knowing full well they are about to return — didn’t really emerge until the late-1970s. I determined this by gathering setlist data for The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen — three artists that have been playing for decades — and seeing when they started playing encores regularly.

Days later, I felt that this approach was crude. Three artists is a small sample. Could that really tell me anything? I needed to make sure. To do that, I went to Setlist.fm, the world’s largest repository of concert setlists, and grabbed historical data from 17 venues:

• 930 Club (Washington, D.C.)

• Apollo Theater (New York, NY)

• Beacon Theatre (New York, NY)

• Capitol Theatre (Passaic, NJ)

• Carnegie Hall (New York, NY)

• CBGBs (New York, NY)

• Fillmore East (New York, NY)

• Fillmore West (San Francisco, CA)

• Headliner Room at Harrah’s (Reno, NV)

• Hollywood Bowl (Los Angeles, CA)

• Madison Square Garden (New York, NY)

• Metro Chicago (Chicago, IL)

• Red Rocks Amphitheatre (Morrison, CO)

• Royal Albert Hall (London, GB)

• Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel (Dallas, TX)

• Whiskey a Go Go (Hollywood, CA)

• Winterland Ballroom (San Francisco, CA)

I chose these venues for one of a few reasons. They were either open for a long time, had a lot of historical data available, or were generally considered to be a legendary venue. All together I was able to get 27,053 setlists between 1890 and 2024 totaling 366,657 songs performed.

If we only look for setlists with at least ten songs, we see the encore first began to rise to prominence in the mid-1970s with 52% of shows in our sample having one by 1978. The encore rate ranges between 31% and 51% during the 1980s before consistently rising throughout the 1990s and 2000s. By 2000, 57% of shows in our sample have an encore. By 2010, 76% do.

Then something interesting happens. Less shows start having an encore. In fact, the encore rate of 54% in 2024 is closer to a rate that we’d see in the late-1970s. This data aligns with my real life experience.

The band that I’ve seen the most times is The Gaslight Anthem. When I first saw them, they’d always play a two or three song encore. Now, they almost never do. In fact, the first time I saw them play an encore-less show, frontman Brian Fallon explicitly told the crowd that no matter how much they clapped, the band was not coming back to the stage. He thought it was silly to leave the stage knowing full well they’d return. Why not just play the whole set without the false pageantry?

As one final note, I found it interesting that even as the encore became more prevalent during the 1990s and 2000s, the length of the encore did not change. The average encore has been 2 to 3 songs consistently since 1970s. That’s at the same time that average set length has increased slightly from about 16 songs to about 19 songs. This suggests that bands are following The Gaslight Anthem approach. Rather than leaving the stage for 30 seconds before playing a planned encore, they just play their entire set. In other words, the encore may be dying, but you aren’t getting shortchanged.

A New One
"Chop Chop" by Sam Ronan
2024 - Music Hall

The clarinet can evoke whimsy. It can also evoke sadness. And it does both of those things on Sam Ronan’s recent song “Chop Chop”. But Ronan also uses the clarinet to evoke another emotion: horror. If you’re not sure what I mean, just look at the lyrics to a song that otherwise comes across as playful:

Father John gets the bone saw
Walks out back to the shed
Oh, he has some work to do this morning
That little boy is dead
Start it up
Chop chop

An Old One
"Anna Walks Away - Alone Again" by Anton Karas
1949 - Zithering Jazz

Anton Karas spent his life running from fame. In the late-1940s, he was playing zither at a small tavern in Vienna when film director Carol Reed stopped by while preparing to shoot his film The Third Man. Enchanted by the music, Reed insisted that the unknown Karas write music for the film. Karas obliged and it changed his life, leading to riches and repeated requests to perform for international royalty.

After sporadic tours, the ever-homesick Karas opened up a tavern in Vienna to get away from the spotlight. Much to his anger, movie stars and directors began to frequent the establishment. He eventually retired, finally able to return to his earlier anonymity. All these years later, when you listen to his compositions, they remain as hypnotizing as the day Carol Reed first heard them on the streets of Austria.

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