Hacker News Reader

Comment by defaultcompany | Hacker News Reader

On the cassette tape version of The Wall I had if you flipped the cassette over during this phone call sequence it would end up being right in the middle of another song (can't remember which one) which has this recording playing as part of the background. I feel like it couldn't have been intentional but who knows.

View on HN

I’m betting subconscious but intentional. I’ve heard a couple artists talk about how they organize an album and there’s a vibe they’re going for but I didn’t get the impression any of them had it down to anything like a science.

Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz. It’s just two artists putting a story arc together by feel and getting the same shape. A bit birthday paradox, but a bit shared vibe.

In the case of The Wall, I would bet a certain degree of symmetry was being reached for. Few artists want to leave or start an album on a sour note, but there will be songs in the middle that are.

One of the things I miss from the pre-streaming era is that “nobody” listens to whole albums at a time anymore, and I find that a shame. I used to start humming the next song on the album when I would hear things on the radio. Makes it worse when they trim the intro or outro for radio play though. I prefer the album version of Wish You Were Here, for instance.

My then-15 year old daughter surprised me a few years ago. We had just pulled up to the house. Instead of opening the car door, she put on Led Zeppelin I and we sat in the car listening to the entire album together. I honestly think that was the first time in her life that she put on an entire album to listen to.

And she did appreciate what an experience it was - like watching a movie when all you've ever seen were Youtube Shorts, or like reading a novel when all you've ever read were memes.

Most good albums have one song that was never released as a single, that’s just for the fans. So even beyond the “story” the album contaminates, they miss important chapters.

Anyone who talks about Tears for Fears, a side conversation about The Working Hour will start. Throwing Copper had five or six singles released over almost three years, but Pillar of Davidson is still my favorite song from that album, and one of my favorites overall. I could listen to Kashmir or PoD in much the same mood. They just build and build.

It would be similar to Patreon content today (though writers with Patreon or magazine articles often release collections later that have all of the rarer content. Martha Wells is the first to spring to my mind, and Naomi Novik for another)

For me that's very often the 7th song on an LP and usually starts its second side

Wow, I remember noticing this same thing back when I was exploring a lot of different artists. On streaming sites often a bands top songs will be ones that came out recently, or a collab they did with a more popular band, or a track that for whatever reason appealed to a wider audience. But those aren’t what you really want to hear if you’re trying to decide if you like that band. My strategy would instead be to go find either the bands earliest studio album or the oldest album that is well represented in their top tracks and skip to track 7. I never thought about why, but it definitely works.

> One of the things I miss from the pre-streaming era is that “nobody” listens to whole albums at a time anymore

I’ve been looking forward to finding out how Aphex Twin has built projects around the streaming format. It may take many more years and releases until someone finds out something like the ten seconds from 0:30-0:40 on all his tracks work when randomly played together in any order, or something along those line.

Alphaville's second album Afternoons in Utopia starts with quiet muffled word "night", then followed by few seconds of silence and then first song called IAO starts. The last song on that album is about Lady Bright:

    There was a young lady named Bright
    Who's speed was much faster, much faster than light
    She departed one day
    In a relative way
    And returned on the previous...

The first words on Pink Floyd’s The Wall are “… we came in?”. The last words on the album are “Isn’t this where …”.

Dream Theater has a string of 4 albums (over 6 years) in which each album starts with the soundscape from the end of the previous album. The last album in the cycle, Octavarium, musically and thematically finishes in a loop, connecting the end of the last song to the beginning of the first.

If memory serves, I believe record players that could flip the records were contemporary to the release of The Wall. My parents didn’t have a flipper but they had a player that could play a stack of records and The Wall was the first or second LP try bought to play on it.

That definitely works on an auto reversing tape deck, which it looks like existed for fifteen years prior.

Sharp made an auto-reversing turntable, it played both sides, front-loaded like a CD player. I have never seen one, despite being an old guy who is of that era. There were but a handful of turntables that could do this, so that’s a lot of production effort for a joke but a few were equipped to get.

There were a lot of eight tracks during that time, though, so sibling comment is more likely correct.

It is more likely a gimmick for the 8-track release.

The Wall is a double album though.

It's a nice coincidence but I doubt it was intentional or even subconscious - The Wall was released in 1979, when casette tapes were only just starting to become popular (it was the same year as the first Walkman was released, which contributed hugely to their growth). The vast majority of record sales were vinyl and most bands would be concentrating on that format.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com