I was gonna highlight some passages above that resonated with me and comment on some but I stopped myself.

“What are you DOING? Are you playing just the singles, reducing this brilliant, well-composed essay to a few salient points that will get passed around the internet, disconnected from the ‘album’ that is the whole essay? Are you mad, sir!”

I didn’t want to appear crazy or gauche so I’m leaving a comment on the entire essay, intact and in context.

Before the techbros decided to re-engineer music by convincing us we just wanted a few songs and everything else on an album is filler designed for the sole purpose of selling us crap we didn’t need, musical artists agonized over the tracks as much as writers do chapters of a book. They did. I’ve sat in on studio sessions where that was always the thread. Nobody talked about the “single” as the art. The single was just the hook to the real art; the album.

I’ve begun buying LPs again and the experience is vastly different that a playlist. A playlist sounds like the radio. An LP is like listening to a story. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a story and sometimes I just need pleasant noise.

To chair dance to. Or lose my soul into. Can’t do that being jerked from Janis Ian to Miley and back to Adele and Taylor Momsen.