Amplified Observations' columnist Luke Furman explains why it’s all right to like and appreciate an album but never return to it after an initial listen.
It’s difficult to listen to a whole album. In fact, any new release more than 45 minutes — even when it’s by an artist I admire — tends to have me squirming in my desk chair, contemplating if I should resolutely press on or listen to something else.
However, if you do choose to finish an album for the first time and you find that you appreciate it, that’s enough of an accomplishment in itself, and whether you return to that album on another unspecified date should be wholly unpredictable and spontaneous.
It’s absolutely OK to listen to albums only once.
And just because you never listen to an album twice, doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate that album for what it is and let it exist somewhere outside your psyche. In that first listen, you most likely absorbed the overall musical nutrition said album has to offer. That, or no phrases from the album, lyrical or instrumental, stuck in your head, lingering like a depressed moth to a post-punk porch light.
There are dozens of albums I have listened to only once and never returned to, but if some of those albums were brought up in conversation, I would add “Oh yeah, that’s a great album.” Sure, I’ve only listened to The Rolling Stone’s Sticky Fingers once all the way through, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a landmark in classic rock, it just didn’t work its way into my Spotify rotation.
There are other albums that I’ve really liked but find it difficult to be in the mood to play them.
It’s a labor listening to Migos or Rae Sremmurd when you’re not feeling energetic or hardcore punk when you’re not angry and beleaguered. Yet, every once in awhile, there are occasions and moods when these releases are worth revisiting, even for a single song (“Hannah Montana,” obviously).
The fallacy to this argument is that some albums require multiple listens to fully realize their artistic zenith. No one is going to catch all the tiny details that make Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City so memorable on the first listen. And along with lyrical intricacy, works that have many layers of instrumentation such as Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion or Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker require multiple listens in order to take in what exactly is occurring sonically.
No one is going to fall in love with every album he or she listens to, no matter how hard one tries. The bottom line is if you enjoy a certain album but feel that it doesn’t have anything more to offer, then it’s totally all right to take it off the record player and put Mac Miller’s new stuff back on.
Luke Furman is a sophomore studying journalism and a reporter for The Post. Do you find yourself struggling to listen to whole albums? Tweet him @LukeFurmanOU or email him at lf491413@ohio.edu.
