I've been thinking a lot about double-albums lately, not least because the next Elastic No-No Band album, Fustercluck!!! (due [hopefully] this summer), is intended to be a double-album (although if it ends up being 79 minutes of music, I'll not hesitate to jam all that onto one disc). I was talking to Brook Pridemore about how, as I've been listening to new songs as we record them, I inevitably have thoughts like, "That one will go somewhere in the first three songs on disc 2," "That one will probably be near the end of disc 1," "That could go in the middle of either disc," etc. etc.

It's a bizarre fascination/compulsion to have, because I don't think track order matters as much with a double-album. I was listening to the White Album by The Beatles today, and found myself kind of scratching my head at the sequencing choices, the songs bump up against each other and progress from one to the other, sometimes with a discernible flow and often without. At a certain point, the content -- all those songs -- rather than the presentation is what matters. People want to hear "Blackbird" or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or whatever; it doesn't really matter where it lands during the album's play.

(Now of course with the double-disc concept album, that's a different case. If the band is trying to tell you a story, even if it's only a story that makes sense to them, the order in which the songs show up usually matters.)

The Clash's Sandinista! -- whose all-over-the-placeness and extraordinary length (36 songs, originally on 3 records) was a big influence on my initial approach to Fustercluck!!! -- has 2 songs I really like, "The Magnificent Seven" and "Police on My Back." The first song is the first track on the album and easy to find, the second is like... track 4 on side 3, or something. But it doesn't matter. I like Sandinista! because it's all over the place, and somewhere in there it contains those songs I like.

Now some double-albums can be real focused and conceptual, not just in a storytelling way. Maybe disc 1 is rockin' and disc 2 is stripped-down (my favorite example of this is Taj Mahal's Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home -- he even bothered to give each disc a different name). Maybe the two discs explore distinctly different lyrical or musical themes.

These are not albums I am concerned with.

I'm pondering the albums where the artist or the band obviously just had too much to say in too many different ways, or they just had too much time to fuck around, to put the end result on one measly LP or CD.

A couple of weeks ago, I got Squeeze's East Side Story out from the public library, and at first, it seemed like the perfect follow-up to Argybargy, a new-wave/pub rock album that includes tons of gems, but especially "Pulling Mussels From A Shell" and "Another Nail In My Heart." But then... East Side Story started to go in weird directions -- that perennial '80s blue-eyed soul track "Tempted"* crops up, and then there's a tune with weird psychedelic organ touches, and then there's a country song! Shit, despite being a single disc, this feels like a double-album. A trip to Wikipedia reveals that the album was going to be, but was scaled back. But you see, I could tell.

Somehow, a double-album is a state of mind rather than a running time.

A perfect example of this would be a recent acqusition: Benji Hughes's debut album A Love Extreme, a double-CD despite only being about 65 minutes long. But my man Benji goes this way and that, from dance music to '70s-style rock to low-key singer-songwriter to ramshackle garage rock and beyond. And after the album, you are tired. You need these tunes broken up a bit for you.

Hmmm... Well, Fustercluck!!! is going to be a full-band rock album, mixed with some stripped-down solo stuff, a lot of collaborations with a bunch of different featured performers, there's gonna be some children's songs, some covers, a lot of new original material, some goofy little throwaway tracks, some tracks which we've been recording in segments for months, and some tunes we're just gonna rock out live in one take.

I think maybe even if it ends up clocking in at 50 minutes, this thing is definitely gonna be a double-album.

Justin

*It was interesting to find out too that the guy who sings "Tempted" was only in Squeeze for one album and only sang on this song. Later, he joined Mike + The Mechanics and sang "The Living Years".