Listening to Full Albums Again

I've recently chosen to listen to albums in full, instead of the usual shuffled playlists I've preferred in the past, it's bee fun.

Ariadne—a fellow blogger I enjoy reading a lot—published a post of the same title yesterday, and, without having read any of its content, I decided to borrow the topic at hand. Last time I tried this was quite fun so, here it goes.

For a while my music listening mostly consisted of putting all my music on shuffle, or creating huge playlists of a music genre or artist, and put that on shuffle.

This wasn’t always the case. When I was a child my parents would just play music from CDs and cassette tapes on the car’s music player, or one of those portable ones with a handle to carry it around. Music would play in the order it came and that was it.

I grew up, and I finally got to have my own phone, which had the epic feature of playing music! I don’t even remember how I got it on there. I didn’t have enough local music of any specific genre and I didn’t download full albums either, I would only get MP3 songs I liked from random places. Streaming was not an option growing up.

When I finally got access to things like Spotify, I was able to look up pretty much every song ever and add it all to playlists, depending on the genre. I started to treat music as separate things to be enjoyed individually.

I remember playlists with every Coldplay album at the time, one with my favorites from Daft Punk or one for relaxing music from videogames and such.

This stayed more or less the same when I got into City Pop. I was not familiar at all with artists or albums of the genre—yeah I only knew Plastic Love and Stay With Me—so I just searched for playlists from Spotify, took the songs I liked from those and made my own.

Eventually, I stopped using Spotify and streaming for the most part, and now that I have local music again. And that I am not limited by storage like on my first phones, I just started to get the full albums downloaded to my phone, I am kind of iffy about not having everything in full I guess.

As an aside, a caveat of no longer using music streaming is that I don’t have any sort of “Yearly Recap” with cool graphics, but I guess ListenBrainz’ stats suffice.

Back on topic. I am not fully sure when I actually went back to listening to full albums again, but there are two occasions that come to mind.

First would have to be Love Trip by Takako Mamiya. I was amused by this album and I listened to it all on a YouTube upload. It was the only album she ever released. Once I got it locally, it didn’t make sense to shuffle a single album, so I just always listen to it in full, and it has been a joy every single time.

Another case has to be Daft Punk’s Alive 2007. Since it was a live concert recording, the cheering of the audience is heard throughout all the tracks. Listening to a single track of that makes no sense, there would be noise and cheers fading in and out without any context at all. But once you play the entire album in one go, it’s an experience like nothing else.

Eventually, those moments made me realize the value of going through the order intended by the artist, and I did that with more and more albums. I listened to Discovery and Random Access Memories from start to finish, I even re-discovered some songs that I somehow forgot existed, like Within in RAM which never got much attention from me, I was too busy playing Instant Crush on repeat during high school I guess.

I still use playlists in some cases like the “music to relax and study to” kind of stuff. And again, sometimes I still just like one song more than the others, so I’ll have that on a separate playlist for my favorites. In a sense, they are just custom albums. You can piece together songs that fit a theme or some other criteria. However, I’ll admit I haven’t tried to create a playlist with intent other than Select Album > Add to Playlist—maybe some other day.

These past few weeks, I’ve purchased the videogame soundtracks for Hollow Knight and Silksong, as well as Celeste, Hyper Light Drifter, Jet Lancer, not to mention the music of 1000xRESIST I got earlier in the year. All of them are great, and listening to those albums in one fell swoop has been very fun, so that’s what I’ve been doing for a while.

And now after watching the fantastic TRON Legacy—and the not so fantastic TRON Ares—listening to those soundtracks has been awesome too.

My podcast listening has lowered a bit compared to last year too, so I guess playing full albums instead of shuffled playlists has made me listen to more music overall.

And how can it not? I say.

Listening to the full album provides a different experience, each song connected to the next, even those that aren’t that great on their own are heightened by the way they fit like a puzzle piece among the others, and when you get to the ones that are really good by themselves, they’re improved by the whole journey further more.

I guess that feeling is not universal for some people, but well, it’s how it is for me and the music I listen to.

So, in short, I like listening to full albums now, it’s pretty cool I think ;)

And now I’ll read Ariadne’s original post, you should too! I’m sure it’s good, she never dissapoints :P