Stop Skipping, Start Listening: Why Albums Still Matter
Image Courtesy: Pixabay
There’s a language that forms when you listen to music on albums rather than playlists. When you repeat that same album over and over and over again until it's engraved in you, until the metaphorical disc gets worn down, you start to become fluent in it.
You learn the timing of every song transition without thinking. Catch the harmonies buried in the back of the tracks that you missed on the first ten listens. Notice which ear the audio pans to in your favorite song, and how silence is used just as intentionally as sound. You start measuring time in your life by the length of your albums. You remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard track six. You understand the lyrics as something that exists in both your life and the artist’s life at the same time.
For me, if there is a song that deeply moves me, it feels like a teaser for the big blockbuster. A single chapter pulled from an epic. There have been many times that the album doesn’t add up to the magic of that song, but there have been so many times where that song is a portal into another world.
Image Courtesy: Pixabay
Think about how Paramore’s “Misery Business” was a gateway into the hallways of the pop-rock world of Riot!, or how “Hide and Seek” unlocks the door to Imogen Heap’s layered synth-dream soundscapes in Speak for Yourself. Would Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die have shaped an entire aesthetic the way it did without the power of “Video Games” paving the way?
Those songs didn’t just exist on their own. They were invitations.
To slip into sultry oceans like Sade’s Love Deluxe or The Marias’ Submarine. To drift through supersonic galaxies like Daft Punk’s Discovery or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Or to the inner workings of an artist’s mind, the place they call home, like Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess or Charli xcx’s brat.
Image Courtesy: Pixabay
I don’t think playlists are ruining music. They just feed into the kind of quick-fix lifestyle we’ve all grown used to. Everything is faster now. Thirty seconds is enough to decide if something is worth your time. We skip, shuffle, move on. Listening to an album asks something different from you. It asks you to stay, to pay attention, and to sit with something from beginning to end. Taking the time to hear a body of work is taking the time to slow down in life, something everyone requires here and there.
So the next time you’re going through your workout playlist or your top hits and you find that one song that sticks with you, the one you replay without thinking, try following it back to where it came from. Because there’s a chance you didn’t just find a song.
You’ve likely fallen in love with a single brushstroke of a painting that was always meant to be seen in full. And if you let yourself sit with it, if you let it unfold the way it was meant to, you might find something that stays with you a little longer. Something that grows with you. Something that feels like it belongs to you just as much as it ever did to the person who made it.
Not just a song you liked once.
Something you carry with you for the rest of time.
Check out this accompanying playlist for more listening inspiration!
Strike Out,
R. S. Jimenez
Edited by: Olivia Wagner & Arsheeya Garg
Roger Jimenez is a Staff Writer for Strike Magazine Orlando and a recent English graduate from the University of Central Florida. A freelance writer since 2020, he works as a copywriter and local journalist with bylines in Visit Orlando, The Orlando Real, VoxPopuli, and The Apopka Voice, among others. He’s still chasing his full-time Carrie Bradshaw dream.
