It is the sad reality of today’s music industry that many consider the art of making an album to be dying away. They say no one has time for the larger picture; no one appreciates the craft, the rise and fall, the climactic beauty that an album can contain. A good album is every bit as complex as a good novel or a good film, and the best ones can throw formula to the wind. There are still bands fighting with every last breath to keep the album alive, though mainstream media is focusing more and more on individual tracks, songs leaked apropos of any longer release forthcoming.
So, in writing this article, I hope you understand that I am not telling you to avoid these albums and just download a few songs here and there. I’m trying to give listeners who don’t consider the craft that goes into making an album a glimpse of understanding, in the hopes that you will think about the process of making music differently, and maybe listen more closely from now on.
Now, the concept here is not simply that the first or second half of an album is good and the other half is bad. It could be that every even numbered track on an album is golden, and the ones in between just can’t compare. It could be a parsing of tracks; maybe the first three and the last two of an album are good, but the middle doesn’t fit quite as well. The first album here is an example of promise squandered by a mood killed, but it doesn’t mean that the second half is awful, just that it isn’t as good as the beginning.
Do we understand? Good.
Great Halves of Albums (Part One)
By: Christian Hagen
Ben Folds Five, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (the first half)
Imagine that you’re a musician, a singer and artist who’s spent a career crafting a very particular brand of piano pop. Known for your sense of humor and occasional bouts of obscenity, as well as that one ballad that wouldn’t leave the mainstream radio, you feel boxed in. What would you do? You’d try to branch out, of course. And indeed that’s what Ben Folds, and the other two (not four) members of Ben Folds Five did in 1999. They decided to create a seamless album, a kind of concept album about a man who doesn’t exist, where the songs blended together with no gaps in between. But just as they were attempting to craft their vision, things began to fall apart. The songs became separated. Obvious attempts at catchy singles were injected, and the whole mess was such that the band couldn’t handle the pressure and imploded. And for many, that’s the legacy of Reinhold Messner; it’s the album that killed Ben Folds Five.
But if you were to just listen to the first five songs, the legacy becomes much deeper, much more personally felt and richly realized. In the first five songs of this album, Ben Folds made arguably the best music of his career, solo or otherwise. “Narcolepsy” pulls you in softly, and then throws everything into the mix in a way that is thrilling and startling at the same time. “Magic” explodes from a wistful piano ballad to a shuddering orchestral chorus. And “Hospital Song”, short, sweet, heartbreaking, can still bring a listener to tears with every listen. In these songs is everything the band had hidden under the surface for years; hurt, beauty, love, honesty. It’s truly classic music. Unfortunately, the mood is entirely shattered by two radio-ready hits, “Army” and “Your Redneck Past” which, though they are the songs everyone remembers from the album, lose the lonely and regretful mood of the album’s opening, and though the rest of the songs retain some poignancy, the magic is lost, the spell is broken, and it cannot be returned in time for the band’s soft lullaby.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy (the Lennon tracks)
It’s no stretch in the music world to say that Yoko Ono probably helped break up The Beatles, though it’s fairly well understood that they would have broken up eventually anyway. And I won’t go the cruel route and say that Yoko Ono was purely untalented. She was a surprisingly good visual artist. What Yoko Ono was not good at, however, was making listenable music. And because John Lennon, we presume, was a good husband and was willing to support his wife, he included her in his musical exploits. The last official result of this was Double Fantasy, released three weeks before John’s tragic murder, the last enduring piece of his musical gifts to the world. And in here we find some of his best work, classic songs from “(Just Like) Starting Over” to “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” to “Watching the Wheels”. Here he is tender, occasionally introspective, and mostly upbeat.
This, of course, does not describe the material from the other half of this married couple. Starting with the grating and painful “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” Ono’s songs fall somewhere between frustrating, uncomfortable, and obnoxious. That a soul like John Lennon’s could be laid so beautifully bare, and then paired with such ugly, abhorrent sounds from his own wife is truly a cosmic tragedy, a joke played on music lovers everywhere by some unknown force of evil. This album is the reason a skip button exists. With some albums, you can stop halfway through before it becomes truly disdainful, retain the good inside yourself and never let the harsh world in. At least if it was an actual double album, we would only have to listen to one disc. But with albums like Double Fantasy, you have to navigate your way from good song to good song like you’re leaping from rock to rock over a raging river of lava. Let your mind slip for too long while listening, and suddenly you’re sinking into molten magma with only seconds to escape. And even if you manage to get out quickly, you still get burned.
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I would like to clarify the title of this piece. I refer to this as “Part One” with no clear knowledge of whether I will ever make “Part Two.” I would like to. But, like Dave Chapelle, I’m afraid that if I keep trying, keep digging, I will find not gold, but only dirt. I’m afraid that if I continue this piece, a reader will be left thinking, ‘Maybe he should have quit while he was ahead.’ Then, irony of ironies, this would be an example of half working against the whole. But still, two albums is an incomplete examination. It’s not as concrete as it could or should be. So for now, we’ll call it “Part One,” and say that another part is on its way.
You could very easily help me with this. If you know of any albums that you think would apply here, PLEASE feel free to tell me so in the comments section, or shoot me an email. Because I would like to finish this, despite the fact that it might end up being a failure in the end.