The End of Albums
And a case study
Some time ago, caught within the riptide of Instagram Reels, I saw a comedian explain playlist culture. He said that, when he asked his nephew what kind of music he liked, his nephew told him “chill hop-hop.”
Cool, he replied. What kind of chill hop-hop? Like what artists? The nephew pointed at a Spotify playlist. The sweeping and seemingly irreversible changes to listening habits is not demographics: it’s behavior. In the era where the economy of Taylor Swift outranks 50 countries, it would be ill-informed to say that artists have become commoditized. But it would be obvious to say that most music audiences follow a personality, but don’t necessarily follow an album.
The results from a survey of 8,000 people found:
54% listen to fewer albums than five to ten years ago
40% prefer listening to playlists
36% listen to albums in chronological order
9% prefer listening to albums
Let’s linger on that final statistic: less than 10% of people see the reason to listen to a whole album. Why bother with a deep dive, when there’s so much more ocean to swim on the surface?
If musicians created music for consumer-friendly formats, the album would be dead already. Luckily, even at a time when 100,000+ songs are uploaded every day to streaming platforms like Spotify. On Apple Music, listeners can enjoy 100 million songs at the lightest stroke of a finger. Music, at least, still has a market. Pity the writers torturing themselves to write for a country where 54% of adults say they haven’t read a book in the past year.
Reading and music, products, actions, and sensations available at any time and any place, have become functional and cosmetic: artistic accessories that give the audience, not the artist, control. Just listening to music and not doing anything else is sub-optimal when the music can gild another pleasure.
An album expects the listener to engage within a specific environment. Playlists of algorithmically similar sounds are on tap to shape the listener’s environment.
So when my band Job Creators started working on our new album, “Love Monster,” we kept asking ourselves one simple question: why are we making an album still? Why go through years of songwriting and production to make something that has, say, eleven songs instead of six? Why still chase tradition?
The answer is simple: we can’t help it.
Enter the Album
We started writing the songs for “Love Monster” in late 2019. At the time, our previous album, “Dream Harvest,” (April 2020), hadn’t even come out. That’s the funny thing with any art piece: by the time it finally comes to light, many artists are onto the next journey.
Our EP, “Systems Online,” focused on the machinery of emotion and “Dream Harvest” traveled through the territory of growing and realizing dreams. “Love Monster” is an ocean-themed album. Each song takes the listener further out to sea to discover something new.
For artwork, we worked with the inimitable Alexander Naughton, who does all the art for our good friend Erik Hoel’s substack, “The Intrinsic Perspective.”
For production and recording, we couldn’t have got far without Jesse Marks Russell and Alex Allinson of The Bridge Sound & Stage Studio
Here’s how we tried to make every song in the album flow through the experience:
1. Waverunner
In “Waverunner,” the first song on the album, we set sail in search of connection. Alan Watts reminds us throughout the song:
“You and are all continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean… we are consciousness.”
2. Cargo Hold
“Cargo Hold” is a heavier, funkier song with a bass riff that bounces up and down on the waves. There’s a weight and a drama in the motion: the baggage we stow away and carry on the voyage is tossing back and forth somewhere, locked away.
3. Realm Render
How do we find guidance when we’re so far out at sea? How do we understand our relationship to life when we’re feeling lost, driftless, lonely?
“Realm Render” is a reassurance, an affirmation of infinite human potential. As Barry White explains in the song:
“We are all gods on this planet.”
At the end of the mantra, in all the complexities of that rhythm, the confidence decays even if the sentiment lingers. And we transition to the title track.
4. Love Monster
When we love something - whether person, place, object, feeling, idea, or belief - we create something out of that love. These monsters are both miracles and terrors. They creep out of the deep and grab us when we least expect it.
“Love Monster” is a foreboding and exotic melody that slithers around the idea of love and the feelings of it. James Baldwin, who is featured in the song, says that no man and no woman is precisely who they think they are. We dance in that mystery.
As drummer and synth player Tim Winslow describes it:
"‘Love Monster’ was born as a synthesizer riff back in December 2019. It’s meant to be a frank exploration of relationships and how love plays a role in those different relationships… and how you can love differently in different relationships. It’s also about how ow love creates responses. What I loved about the Baldwin quote is that he describes love as ‘love is where you find it.’ Your preconception of love is different from reality.”
“Love can create monsters and the most beautiful moments and, often, that happens at the same time,” Tim says. “Baldwin mentions that love is a terrifying thing.”
5. Heart Race
“Heart Race” starts slow and heavy with anxiety and determination swinging back and forth like a pendulum and ends with one powerful, primal beat. It’s about anxiety and anticipation - and keeping the two in balance.
As Tim explains it:
Heart Race is about the anxiety of uncertainty, especially about quarantine and how that feeling comes from the heart itself. We literally feel it like a beat.
In the song, we sample composer Leonard Bernstein, who wrote West Side Story and, in an interview about music, talks about how music, just like life, represents some kind of eternal pulse, an eternal beat that connects everything and everyone. As he says throughout the “Heart Race”:
The fundamental pulse of all life, whether it be our blood or our breath, is everywhere in our lives.
6. Lost Horizon
Traveling so far and seeing so much, “Lost Horizon” is meant to evoke the calm in the wake of calamity, the peace in realizing that something has been lost for good. We continue across the sea, but in the distance that had once been a destination, there is only emptiness… and tranquility.
7. Midnight Meeting
As much as we have all wanted to forget the quarantine of the early 2020s, the worldwide rapture became part of us all, one way or the other. The album’s interlude, “Midnight Meeting,” offers a sorrowful and lonely piano melody to narrate the feeling of our shared apocalypse.
Tim wrote it alone in the practice studio during the height of the lockdowns, when common sense and common science told us we weren’t even supposed to be in the same room together unless we wanted everyone we loved to die.
8. Quorumtine
In what may be the only disco and dance-themed song about COVID-19, “Midnight Meeting” snaps into motion when “Quorumtine” follows. The samples are broken out into confused echoes about stopping the spread. In the back of the song, we hear a rallying cry that the cure can’t be worse than the disease. This is a song, like everyone’s personal experience of COVID-19, that has twists and turns that, by the end, lead us out of lockdowns to become better, stronger versions of ourselves than before.
9. Lighthouse
If the middle of the journey through “Love Monster” is about losing something - about forgetting how and why and what to love - the last third is about how to find something real.
“Lighthouse” began in the summer of 2020 when my then-girlfriend and I headed back to an empty New York where, every night at seven, Frank Sinatra blasted from somewhere down below in the hollow streets as people clanged pots and pans for first responders reporting for a new round of duty (more on that here).
The tapping bass riff that would become “Lighthouse” attempts to emulate the careless expectation in which we hold each moment when we know, somewhere, that we are getting closer to a new source of light and life.
As Michael Whiteside of Fecking Bahamas describes it:
What really is the Love Monster, anyway? Or who? The band heads back to shore on “Lighthouse,” with a jangling bass line that just can’t wait to reach solid ground as it hops and skips impatiently around the deck. But once they get there, post-encounter, are they ever the same? Possibly not, but that’s just fine with us.
In the album’s last two songs, all the pieces of the journey begin to connect.
10. Rite of Raconteur
When we’ve found a light, what do we become? What life do we choose?
“Rite of Raconteur,” the alt metal power anthem of the album, breaks the doubt with a rabid conviction that whatever we discover in our own heart is our destiny. The truth is what we create. To create anything, we must create it with love. With love comes truth.
As David Bowie explains in the track:
“I’ve embraced the idea that there’s a new demystification process going on… it’s becoming more and more about the audience.
There are always two, three, four five sides to every question. The singularity has disappeared. And that I believe has produced such a medium as the internet which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.”
The bad news: the future is going to be told and lived in fragments.
The good news: we have control over which fragments - these are all pieces of a puzzle we are meant to put together. It all comes down to what we love.
11. Wild Call
In a world where we even measure our moments and our miracles by the numbers, humans tend to forget dreams for the sake of data. Numbers have become sensations: we add up our meanings from likes, shares, comments, connections and messages from our audience, not ourselves. We mistake what we share for who we are.
But who is the person we are that we can’t share with anyone but ourselves?
In “Wild Call,” we grow as we discover what’s important to us - to just us - and in doing so, discover our real selves. Everything goes away when you forget about numbers and simply listen to the call.
Who else could explain this concept of gratitude as power better than Mr. Rogers? As he says in the song:
We get so wrapped up in numbers in our society. The most important thing is that we can be one to one with each other at the moment. If we can be present to the moment with the person we happen to be with at the moment, that’s what’s important.
In finding the love monsters that become us, we feel the future by practicing presence and patience: by listening to music as a journey, not a transaction.
Want to discover the Love Monster? Start from the beginning!
In college, many years ago, I made a joke: "Shuffle is such a strong word."