Music Blogs

Matthew Sweet is GetBack's guest blogger all week. Here's an acoustic performance of "Daisy Chain" from his new album, Sunshine Lies. Click here for another.

I am often asked in interviews whether or not I think album orders still matter. The idea is that in the Internet age, we can simply choose only the songs we like, easily missing out on any specific "album" presentation meant by the artist. It's hard for me to answer this question. On the one hand, our attention span (and that of our Internet-age youth) is increasingly shorter, pulled every which way by the sheer amount of information we have access to. Out of that information, a relatively small amount has anything to do with music. So on the surface, this question makes a lot of sense to ask these days.

I'll often answer that I only know what I liked during the years I was learning about music and becoming a fan of vinyl albums. That was, in a sense, a private world, to be shared only with close friends, or the like-minded who gathered together as a common community for a live concert event of a favorite artist. Probably not your parents.

AOR - album-oriented rock, a radio format that thrived during my youth - showed that singles weren't the only way, and addressed the growing seriousness of rock artists' album statements by playing not just hits but also various album tracks. Often this resulted in unexpected hits as well. I remember, for instance, "Lola" by the Kinks becoming really popular long after the album that introduced it had fallen from view. In this way AOR radio extended the meaning and message of artists, bringing a particular respect to albums that were actually good all the way through. These weren't the mindless hits we still heard on AM radio and on the major networks. I remember thinking to myself, If I'm ever on the Grammys, I'll know I totally suck. It was us against them.

It must be impossible for many younger people now to fully understand just how different our lives were before the internet. Apart from a handful of magazines that covered records, it was very difficult to find out much about most artists.

So we relied on the album. An incredible magical private world offered to you on a wax platter, ready to consume. And consume them we did. An album felt like it meant something. While you listened to it, you perused its artwork for meaning, any clues (besides the lyrics) as to how the artist felt. An album was physically big and felt like it was worth something, even if the music itself seemed to emanate from the ether (the old-timey word for space). The album artwork might even tell you who produced, engineered, and played on a record! (iTunes, what is the problem with this? How about some info with the downloads?)

The situation was made in heaven for the fan. You felt like you knew that artist. And there was still plenty of mystery. That kind of mystery would be hard to keep in a bottle these days. But I know that I, and probably many others, still care what the artist meant. And we're more than willing to listen to the whole album. Having said all this, I'm pretty sure kids today that are REALLY music fans probably still feel the same way. Despite knowing too much about everything.

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