Studio Diary Part 12

Tracklists & album titles 😬

Monday, October 16

We are decorating the cake; we are finishing the hat. So begins the last week of tracking, where all the bits and bobs that were left to the very end get added. That little keyboard line that’s been in your head this whole time, filigreeing the inbetween spaces on the refrain of that one song? Now’s your time to shine, boy. Also, we begin in earnest to mull over sequencing and, God help us, album titles.

Today, I am almost entirely certain that this will be a double album, despite the usual warnings from the people with better commercial/financial sense than I — that double LPs are invariably more expensive and fewer people buy them. Who gives a fuck? We’re creating art, not a commodity! Of course, the Scylla to the commercial/financial argument’s Charybdis is the fact that an overwhelming amount of double LPs tend to be bloated things, chocked with filler and songs that might’ve otherwise been abandoned to the b-side of some UK-only 7”. This has been the main thing that has warned me off this course in the past. What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World was very nearly was a double LP, as close as we’d ever come, were it not for the valiant efforts of our product manager at Capitol who lured me from that particular ledge. I think he was probably right, though that hasn’t stopped me from assembling that double LP WATWWABW sequence in a playlist on Spotify. Even in its commercial form, however, it was a one-and-a-half LP, clocking in at fifty three minutes. It was three sides of vinyl; the fourth side was etched.¹