Ideal Album Lengths

We knew we were in trouble when Aerosmith started putting out 60-minute records.

I recently purchased two Van Halen albums on vinyl and noticed how quickly I had to flip the record. VH wasn’t prone to long-winded releases. Check out the times of their first several records:

Van Halen, 35:34
Van Halen II, 31:36
Women and Children First, 33:35
Fair Warning, 31:11
Diver Down, 31:04
1984, 33:22

Not until you get into the CD era do their albums go over 40 minutes.

It’s not as if the LP format was limited to 35 minutes’ worth of music. I remember back in the day dubbing LPs onto a side of a Maxwell 90-minute cassette tape and having to cut songs when copying Genesis records. My first two purchases from Genesis were …And Then There Were Three and Selling England by the Pound, which both came in at over 53 minutes, more than an entire album side of material than your typical Van Halen record. Talk about getting more bang for your buck.

You could argue that the fidelity of those old Genesis albums wasn’t very good due to the physical constraints of the LP format and the compromises that had to be made to pack in that much music, but there were very good-sounding records with more content than your standard hard rock album:

Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon: 42:50
Stevie Wonder, Innervisions: 43:52
Supertramp, Breakfast in America: 46:06
Toto IV: 42:17
Michael Jackson, Thriller: 42:16

Clearly, even during the vinyl era, bands could put out records that were over 40 minutes that still sounded amazing (which is why engineer Ken Caillat’s argument that the wonderful song ”Silver Springs” had to be dropped from the 38-minute Rumours doesn’t really hold water).

But then came the CD, and things started to get out of hand. Aerosmith’s 1993 release Get a Grip clocked in at a whopping 62 minutes! Who on Earth needed to hear over 60 minutes of Aerosmith in 1993? Van Halen’s 1998 release Van Halen III was 63 minutes. Rush got into the act too, with Vapor Trails and Snakes and Arrows both well over an hour long.

I’m a big Rush fan. But that’s too damn long.

Listening to records from the CD era, it’s hard not to conclude that if artists had had some self-discipline, they could have ended up with a perfect 40-minute record. I recently listened to the Genesis album We Can’t Dance from 1991, and it’s generally regarded as a subpar album, but it’s over 71 minutes! If you cut out five of the weakest tracks (and there are definitely five weak tracks), I think you’d end up with a very good 45-minute album.

For a more recent example, Peter Gabriel’s I/O from 2023 may contain some good songs, but once again, it runs at almost 70 minutes long. It’s just too much, with too many tracks that aren’t distinctive enough to hold a listener’s attention for over an hour.

One could rightly point out that some of the greatest records ever released have been double-LPs with a lot of material. Consider the following:

The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album): 93:33
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main St.: 67:07
The Who, Quadrophenia: 81:42
Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti: 85:59
Fleetwood Mac, Tusk: 74:02
Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life: if you include the extra EP included with the double album, a whopping 104:29
The Clash, London Calling: 65:07
Pink Floyd, The Wall: 80:42
Prince, 1999: 70:29

That’s a pretty amazing list, so why was it okay for those bands to put out lengthy records but not Aerosmith, Van Halen and Rush?

Well, it would have been okay for those bands to put out a double album when they were at their creative peaks. You want to combine Toys in the Attic and Rocks into one double album? Sold! It would be among the all-time best. The same for Van Halen’s first two records or Rush’s Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures.

But by the 1990s, these bands were not producing their best stuff. Yes, some of it was good. Maybe a lot of it was good. But an awful lot was filler, fluff, overwrought, drawn out and tedious. Long albums should be reserved for artists at their peaks, creating so much material that they can hardly stop themselves from composing great track after great track, struggling to find a way to get it all out on record. That’s why in the CD era it made sense for artists like Smashing Pumpkins, 2Pac, Drive-By Truckers, Beyonce, Christina Aguilera and Arcade Fire to put out really long albums. It was their time.

In the 1990s, it was not Rush’s time, nor Genesis’s nor Van Halen’s.

And let’s face it: sometimes less is more. I’ll take a perfect half-an hour record by Van Halen any day over a bloated album that has me constantly reaching for the skip button.

After writing the above, I wondered if I’d ever committed the sin of producing an album that was way too long. I did a quick check, and the longest one I’ve ever completed was The Palisades from 2016, clocking in at 47:53. And you know what? It would probably have been better at 40 minutes.

So there you are.

Hitchcock's Rear Window

With Oscar night right around the corner, movies have been on my mind, and last week I happened upon a particular episode of the fabulous podcast Filmspotting, in which co-hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen pitted Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window against his 1958 film, Vertigo. The former has long been in my top three movies of all-time (along with Avalon and Cinema Paradiso), and after watching it last spring for maybe the 20th time, I determined that it was conclusively my favorite film. I was curious to see where Adam and Josh would land on these two films, especially given that Vertigo has long been touted as one of the top two or three movies of all-time on many lists. I needn’t have worried. A few minutes in, I learned that Josh’s default answer for his favorite film has been Rear Window for quite a while.

Not that I needed the validation. I first saw the film at summer camp in Madison, Wisconsin, between my sophomore and junior years of high school, where my fellow music nerds and I would gather in the cafeteria at night to watch movies. Rear Window and Psycho were on the docket that summer, and from that point on, I was all in. For the next half a decade or so it was all Hitchcock, all the time. I rented every movie I could find (oddly, the nearby Sentry grocery store had virtually all of Hitchcock’s 1950s films available for rental on VHS), borrowed several books from the local library (eventually purchasing the wonderful book of filmmaker François Truffaut’s interviews of Hitchcock), and eventually used my newfound knowledge to write a paper for Mrs. Kossoris’s senior English composition class. I was kind of a Hitchcock bully for a while, subjecting many friends to a movie rental night of a subpar film (Topaz and Torn Curtain come to mind) after likely forcing the critical decision at the video rental store.

My enthusiasm for Hitchcock films has been tempered only somewhat since my teenage years, mostly because I started with the best. Rear Window was the first one I saw, and it is indeed his masterpiece. Others have been a hell of a lot of fun: The Lady Vanishes, Lifeboat, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho – but nothing rises to the same level of Rear Window, not even Vertigo. That film is wonderful for its creepiness, its pacing, its dreamlike atmosphere and swirling score, not to mention the superb acting of Jimmy Stewart yet again, but there are more holes in Vertigo’s plot than there are in a Chinese checkers board. Suspension of disbelief is sometimes required when watching film, and I love Vertigo, but I never finish the movie feeling entirely satisfied, similar to how I feel after purchasing a new car and wondering if I’ve been taken by the sales guy.

With Rear Window, the only lingering feelings are those of pure delight. When I first viewed the film in 1984, I was positively captivated by Grace Kelly, enthralled with the comedic banter between her, Stewart and the amazing Thelma Ritter, and stressed out beyond belief at the film’s climax. Unfortunately, suspense can’t really be easily duplicated after multiple viewings, and though I may no longer fear for Lisa Fremont’s life when she’s caught in Lars Thorwald’s apartment, Hitchcock’s deft direction and the smart dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes keeps this movie from getting stale even after several viewings. Hayes may not be a household name – I had to look it up for this blog – but he hit the ball out of the park on this one, not just for its entertainment value, but for its larger themes of voyeurism, isolation, loneliness, and what it means to be a neighbor, issues that sadly feel as on-point today as they likely did in 1954.

Other films I’ve seen have knocked me off my feet for a variety of reasons: Broadcast News, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Goodfellas, Beginners, High Fidelity, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Witness for the Prosecution, The Big Short, Charade, Parasite, Holiday, Amadeus, Schindler’s List, Elf, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Searching for Sugarman, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Get Out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roman Holiday, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I Tonya, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wall*E, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tar, Finding Nemo, Fiddler on the Roof, Long Shot, Michael Clayton, Magnolia, The Great Escape, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense…

But if I had only one film to live with for the rest of my life (not counting trilogies and the like), Rear Window is tops for me.

Now, onto the 2024 Oscars!