Adele is right – a disjointed album is the right way to listen | Adele

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When you are the most powerful folk artist in the world, you can insist on anything. And so Adele convinced Spotify to hide her toggle button, to encourage listeners to tune in to her new 30 album — and likely, every other album — in the order the artists intended. “We don’t create albums with a great deal of care and think about our playlist for no reason,” Adele said. “Our art tells a story and our stories must be heard as we want them to.”

I’m of a generation that still clings to the concept of albums as the largest and most appropriate expression of a musician’s imagination: 40 minutes is pretty much the perfect length to explore most things, musically and lyrically, an artist might have to do. Say, without the risk of boredom. Through the album, I get what I tell myself is the least mediocre version of the artist’s vision. My natural hope is to take the Adele streak.

I think of those perfectly sequenced albums and marvel at them: how Sgt Pepper begins with its sharp title song and moves to its grotesque and deep ending, with the broad, faded piano chord that concludes A Day in the Life. I think about how Radiohead got so caught up in the Kid A sequence that they almost broke up because of it. I think of the brilliance of Bruce Springsteen’s arrangement Darkness on the Edge of Town, in its two-sided LP – the first side concluding with Racing in the Street, its emotional centerpiece, before rebooting with The Promised Land, then ending forever with the devastating title track. I don’t think any rearrangement can improve those albums (except removing “Into You Without You” from Sgt Pepper’s, but that’s before).

Excellence Without a Medium…Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Photo: PA

Ironically, the true genius of the sequence is often most evident when the artist isn’t trying to tell a story through the music, and the sequence itself has to do the heavy lifting, which is usually in the biggest hit group. The obvious thing to do with the songs is arrange them chronologically, which is fine for a train driver, but rarely makes the most well-rounded album. Think instead of Queen’s Greatest Hits, which is not only the UK’s best-selling album of all time just because so many people love Queen, but also because it’s a totally sequential album that starts and ends with a triumph – Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions – that never lets its momentum wan , but without turning into a boring momentum. Unusually for the best results, the compilers weren’t afraid to let deeper cuts – that four-track of Now I’m Here to Flash the second side – do a lot of work, giving it (as much as possible) a sense of discovery, Especially for younger listeners.

Great sequencing can hide weaknesses. Take The Queen Is Dead by the Smiths, an album that really should be terribly lopsided, split between compelling and throwback epics. Placing the big emotional tracks – the first and third on the first side and the fourth on the second side – gives the whole thing an emotional weight it shouldn’t really have. (It’s also a record with a very unusual sequence: His single is both on the second side, to support a side that has to deal with the deputy in Toto and some girls are bigger than the others.)

The truth is that Adele is fighting a losing battle. The reason Spotify enables listeners to shuffle songs in the first place is because people like to do it, and understanding listener habits has encouraged artists and production companies to order albums differently. In fact, some long and musically diverse albums like Drake’s Certified Lover Boy almost seem to hand the task of serialization over to listeners, tacitly acknowledging that they would pick their own favorites in a smaller playlist.

There was once a formula for sequencing. Once albums became a lingua franca among pop, people realized there was a way to maximize their impact: Open big, keep the mood for a few songs, slow them down, and close the side with a statement track. Repeat on the second side. These days the formula is simpler. For almost any artist trying to compete commercially – that is, all but upper-tier superstars, and those whose commercial imperatives don’t matter – albums must be preloaded. Ratings now have access to unimaginable data, and “skip rate” is vital – so is the listener listening for the 30 seconds necessary to the song to earn royalties from the broadcast? It’s now a concern for labels (and artists) to get the most engaging soundtracks at the top (a process that has also changed the nature of songwriting, by prompting writers to throw it all out at the opening).

My Little Love – Part of the 30’s pessimistic opening section.

As music director Barry Johnson told Rolling Stone about an album through his accusations of EarthGang: “We had this fully conceptual album with skits and everything, and we had some of our biggest hits at the end of the album. They [Interscope] They were like, “What if people don’t make it to the back of the album? Attention spans are so short, if you don’t catch people right away, they might not hear the hits at the end. So how about bringing the big songs up front?”

That’s what Adele fights by upholding album priority as a complete listening experience: the artists’ right to make the albums they want. 30 starts moodily and sadly, and we won’t get an uptempo number until the fourth track—the eternity of the modern pop album’s sequence. This isn’t just about telling listeners to eat greens. It’s a reminder that in a world where a Universal boss could achieve more in one year than all British songwriters combined, there would be nothing to promote and sell without the storytelling and imagination of the artists themselves.

What are the best examples of album sequences? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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