The shape of albums

A few days ago Ferrett Steinmetz posted that one of his girlfriends had made a mix CD for him, and went on to say that he believes a mix CD tells you things about the person who made it.  After I read his entry, I found I was vaguely bothered merely by thinking about mix tapes or CDs in the abstract.

I believe my unease comes from growing up in the era of the LP, when the order of songs on an album gave it a certain internal rhythm, a certain shape.  (Sometimes the shape was purposely done by the artist or the producer, sometimes not.)  And often that shape was important to my understanding of what the record had to say.

By now, many of those albums are so embedded in my mind that hearing a single track from an artist as part of a mix CD is jarring, because when I get to the end of “Gonna Cry Today” on Nazz Nazz, for example, I expect “Meridian Leeward” and “Under the Ice” to follow in order.  To hear Neil Young’s “Helpless” instead knocks me right out of what the mixer is trying to tell.

Albums with “bonus tracks” give me the same feeling of dislocation.  I know, to a moral certainty, that Waiting for Columbus is supposed to end with “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now,” and Will the Circle Be Unbroken must end with the grand, ragged choral version of “Circle” followed by Randy Scruggs’s cool-down “Both Sides Now”.  Finding a string of bonus tracks tacked onto the end upsets me, because I know that’s not how the album goes.  Its internal rhythm and its shape are spoiled.

I’ve only made one mix CD in my life, a collection of songs relating to trains, and I’ve never been satisfied with it, because I’ve never found the shape it’s supposed to be.  I get it out and tinker with the track order occasionally, but I haven’t ever sat back afterward and thought, “Okay.  That’s how it’s supposed to go.”

Oddly, I don’t feel the same dislocation listening to thematic, free-form radio.  I enjoy listening to a good free-form show, like Below the Salt from WOUB-FM in Athens, Ohio, or The Phil Music Show on KUT-FM in Austin.  I like to see how the DJ is going to link each set’s selections together this time, try to pin down the theme or free-association logic before he does the back-announce, and second-guess where he’s going to go next.

Phil Donahue rotates the cera.  Fnord.