Kill Your Shuffle Button

Some thoughts on album sequencing

So a couple weeks ago (happy 2024, by the way) in a “studio diary,” I touched briefly on this idea of sequencing a record, that is, sequencing the songs on a record, and I clearly struck a nerve with some folks. I’d like to talk a little more in depth about sequencing, which is something that is maybe inordinately close to my heart.

If you’ll remember, I took a dim view of how people typically engage with records these days — LPs, albums, whatever you want to call them — and how the streaming platforms have changed our listening habits in a not-so-good way. “No!” you cried, or at least some of you, in the comments, “I still listen to records all the way through!” Just to be clear: my tirade was not directed at you, dear Machine Shop subscriber. Clearly, you are a discriminating and careful listener of music and keen appreciator of the labor that is put into the making of music — why else would you be voluntarily receiving this newsletter? Why would you be paying money to receive it (thank you) and maybe even going so far as to post your thoughts in the comments section. No, you are a rare breed.

But even the rarest of music lovers have, from time to time, fallen prey to the conveniences of DSPs (digital service providers¹, as they’re known in the biz, god help you should you ever need to use that initialism yourself). The shuffle button, for reasons still entirely unclear to me, looms on the page as big as any other button. It’s almost like they’re daring you to play an album in order. And what brought you, forsaken listener, to the album page in the first place? Wouldn’t you prefer to hear one of this artists’ songs in one of our millions of curated playlists? Chill Indie, perhaps? Emo Dad Vibes, maybe?

Don’t get me started. But here, I’ve already started, haven’t I? I’ll continue.

With the advent of Napster and LimeWire or whatever, the writing seemed have been on the wall for albums, for LPs. I remember there was a lot of talk about how we had returned to the halcyon days of the 50s and early 60s when albums were reserved for merely the collation of individual songs, songs that were meant to be heard singly, on their own. That’s where the name comes from, right? An album, like a photo album, was intended to be a collection, not a statement in and of itself. Things changed, the Beatles played Ed Sullivan, Dylan rode a motorbike etc etc, and we arrived at the AOR era of rock: the album was the thing. That was the era what raised me. An album was not just an analog to a short story collection, it was sometimes a novel — each song a different chapter, a different panel in the quilt.

I took artists at their word; the order of an album was as intentional as the lyrics inside the songs. A thread was there to follow; clues to unlock. Even if there was no literal connection between the songs, there was a pattern and a rhythm to the thing. Why in God’s name would you put a record on shuffle, to potentially have “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” arrive before “The Queen is Dead?” It would be a disaster.

In my music-obsessed tweens and teens, I studied my favorite records like they were scripture in exegesis. How cool was it that Fisherman’s Blues was divided between two sides, the songs recorded in Dublin at Windmill Lane and the ones recorded in Spiddal? What a rambling old river to follow, to listen to it from beginning to end, to see the band move from the city to the country. You put on side two of Zen Arcade when you were all in a rage about something; side four was for lighting incense and zenning out. Even when CDs obliterated the natural break between sides of a tape or an LP, you could still see the handiwork of the artists. When Rykodisc reissued Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers I remember the sequence being one of the truly revelatory things that this new version introduced — for so long, the sequence had been in dispute. I was going off a German bootleg copy that, as it turns out, didn’t even get the imposter sequence right — the sides were flipped so that “Jesus Christ” kicked the whole thing off, with “Stroke It Noel” coming in halfway through the record. Of course, the Ryko reissue blew the doors off that sequence, starting with “Kizza Me,” of all songs. Song sequencing could sometimes be as baffling as it was revealing.

When it came time that I began assembling records of my own songs, you better believe I cared about the sequence. I got to better understand my own songs in the context of a track order. Where they lived on a record defined them, gave them an added dimension. Sometimes, new meaning could be attached to a song just by putting it at the top of the record. It became a starting pistol, a declarative statement of intent. I discovered that some songs demanded to go first; it’s like they’d be shorn of some kind of crucial meaning should they be shunted into the middle of the record. On more than one occasion (in the sequencing of this new record, in fact) I’ve known that a song can only be a first song. If it can’t be first, it can’t be on the record at all. A lot of times, a first song can also be a last song. Those spots tend to be flexible in their interchangeability. “A Beginning Song” from our 2015 record, What A Terrible World… is one of those. I’d titled it that because it felt like a natural first song — only to discover, after we’d recorded it, that its spot at the top of the tracklist was just too on the nose. To the end it would go. And it works! Alternately, “Sons and Daughters,” in my songwriting journal, has the words “a last song” written on the top of the page.² And that’s where it has (mostly) lived.

Some songs even have “second song” written all over them. It’s an important position, this antepenultimate spot. Sometimes it’s a transitionary song; sometimes it’s the main focus. I was listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland last night and was thinking how interesting it was that arguably the best song on the record (and the title track, for that matter) is the second song. It works, though, doesn’t it? I think it sets up the record as a more cohesive thing — you’re going to need to work through the shattering shop windows and the baboon hearts before you get to the jam, my friend.

There are, of course, some conventions that have brought us to where we are. I remember intuiting that the first song on the second side of an LP or tape was potentially the radio single, a focus track. Practically, it made it so that it was easy for DJs to locate, I think. If you didn’t want to put your single as the first song, you could at least have it at the top of the second side — it telegraphed a kind of importance to the listener. But this has its natural benefits: even in a CD or digital tracklist, having a banger at that spot — where a LP flip would’ve been — helps with the overall flow.

Physical formate have introduced their own limitations. It’s not like the 40-50 minute album has arrived at that length because of some exhaustive research on the span of peoples’ attentions and interests — no, it’s just that you don’t want more than 25 minutes on a side of an LP before the sound quality goes off a cliff. Savage, unforgiving edits have been made to well-meaning songs because they would need to fit into the parameters of a tape or a side of vinyl.³ The CD took some of that pressure off, but you were still meant to keep things around seventy five minutes. Mission of Burma’s self titled comp was, famously, a record that pushed the limits of that rule, coming in around 80 minutes. I think it held the distinction of being the longest single CD ever made at the time.

Coming up in the CD era, then, I think most of the early Decemberists records were sequenced with a CD tracklist in mind — vinyl pressing being too rich a thing for our independent budgets. Castaways and Cutouts, Her Majesty, and Picaresque were all made and sequenced without a thought to how the sides might break up. If the label wanted to cough up for a vinyl edition (and, in the early days, the label didn’t — our early records were pressed by Jealous Butcher, a local label), you’d just have to see how things shook up. The side breaks on these records tend to be bizarre, lumpy, ungainly. Even considering side breaks for Hazards of Love, our vinyl-head record if ever there was one, was a bit of a shoe-horned afterthought; this was a record made for the digital age. The King is Dead was the first record we made in which I earnestly considered vinyl sides during the sequencing.

Strange to be finding myself, after all these years, thinking more about vinyl and cassette sides than I have on most of the records I’ve made. The sequencing for our new record is very meticulous about its side breaks. I hope that comes through. However, it works well in a single stream too — via your DSP of choice or CD. God help you if you hit that shuffle button.

That’s my tirade. Curious about yours guys’ thoughts on this curiosity of music consumption. Do you have a favorite “second song?” What about last songs? Middle songs?

1. Initially I had this as “download service platforms” lol. I’m barely in the biz.

2. Sadly, if you stream it from iTunes or Apple Music, that last song is “After the Bombs” — this from the era when every digital outlet needed its own version, its own “exclusive tracks.”

3. “Slim Slow Slider,” from Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, gets such an axe — thankfully restored with the expanded edition that came out a few years ago.

Here’s the original: