Friday 7 September 2018

The Long And Short Of Song Length

The current organ performance of As Slow as Possible at St Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, began in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640. There have been periods of silence, there was an 18-month pause until February 5 2003 which came as a welcome relief to some but where in the rules does it say that music has to have a set length?
The vast majority of pop songs are still between two and five minutes long and much more than that and there is little chance of it being played on the radio or music channels and for us children of the 80s the only way you would get a song over 5 minutes back then was to buy the 12" Extended Remix although they were mostly just an instrumental version with the original song tacked on the end.
I much prefer short, punchy songs but as a life long Guns N Roses fan i get a bit of both from 3 minute rock outs (Perfect Crime, Right Next Door To Hell, Garden of Eden) to 7 minute plus epics (Coma, November Rain, Civil War).
I sometimes wonder why musicians spin out long songs when really they'd said and done everything in 3 minutes, the 17 minutes of Inna Gadda Da Vidi just seems excessive and the 12 minutes plus of Meat Loaf's 'I Would Do Anything For Love' is about 11 minutes too long but then Meat Loaf never has sung anything in 3 minutes when he can sing it in 9. 
There are some brilliant longer songs but they are mainly the ones that start off as one song and then turn into something else halfway through such as 'One' by Metallica, 'The Spirit of Radio' by Rush and Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Free Bird' which is the ultimate 'pfft, this-is-boring' first 4 minutes to 'wow, this-is-brilliant' last 5 minutes.
For fans of the long songs in music, the average length of the pop song has been creeping ever-upwards over the years, from 2 minutes 36 seconds in the 1950s, up to a patience-testing 4 minute 26 seconds today and i put the blame firmly on Meat Loaf and German organ performances for that.

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