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The 45 Minute Album Limit

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Theory: No album should (or needs to) exceed a 45 minute length limit.

There is no example you give where a little judicious pruning (of song or song length) would not improve said LP.

Even my favourite album of all time, Abbey Road, would be improved by snipping out Sun King(therefore moving straight from You Never Give Me Your Money into Mean Mr Mustard)

Other examples;

A Rush Of Blood To The Head – Coldplay (lose A Whisper and Amsterdam)

Tunnel of Love – Bruce Springsteen (lose When You’re Alone)

Like a Prayer – Madonna (lose Act of Contrition and Keep It Together)

Listen Without Prejudice Vol 2 – George Michael (lose Soul Free)

Editing even made Be Here Now into a passable 9 track 44 minute album…

* incidentally, hugely recommend Mark Lewisohn’s “Hornsey Road” talk doing the rounds. Made me appreciate my favourite album even more. The Isolated John/Paul I Want You vocals were phenomenal.

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Comments

  1. 56-69 – I’m not sure I can think of any album over 45 minutes long … apart from “Aftermath” by The Stones.
    Often regarded as a high point for the group, I’d have it placed seventh of the first seven albums.

    I was looking through the last 30 years of Van Morrison albums and was gobsmacked as to how long most of them were. Same with Ray Davies, who seems to have completely lost the ability to be concise.

    The wonderful John Wesley Harding/Nashville Skyline out-takes disc on “Bootleg Series 15” clocks in at about 43 minutes.

  3. Oh, and, as suggested in the original question, Abbey Road – at 47:03.
    I’d go a step further though … does any album really have to be much over 35 minutes?

  4. Rap albums are the worst for being too long. It’s not as bad now, but until a few years ago they all seemed to think they had to fill the entire 78 minutes of a CD, so they’d shove skits on there and loads of stuff that would have been better left on the cutting room floor (or whatever the music equivalent is). When I go to listen to an album and see it’s over 50 minutes long my enthusiasm tends to drop, no matter who it’s by.

  5. ‘Course we used to do this all the time back in the C90 days*. Hours of fun pruning the weakest moments from our heroes’ precious masterpieces just so we had a clean side 2 of tape…
    (*We all did, didn’t we?)

  6. “The less than 45 minutes to fit on one side of a C90” rule allowed the creation of early Super Deluxe Editions where you could add contemporaneous singles (or just completely random tracks to fill up the tape).
    But what was the rule for albums exceeding 45 minutes?
    Record to the end of the tape, flip it over and record the track again?
    Rejig the track listing to make it fit?
    Buy a C60 instead?

      • Oh god, what’s the opposite of nostalgia? Being permanently skint in my teens and twenties meant constantly eking out* every last second of tapes in this fashion, or waiting with fingers crossed for the record to finish before the tape ran out. What a thing of joy was a spanking new shrinkwrapped C90 and the few weeks (or perhaps days) of properly carefree taping that could be enjoyed…

        (*particularly when recording songs by Eek-a-Mouse)

  7. I’ve got Tommy down to 44:59 (but this does mean excluding “Smash The Mirror”
    Overture  
    It’s a Boy  
    Amazing Journey  
    Sparks  
    Christmas  
    Cousin Kevin
    The Acid Queen  
    Pinball Wizard  
    Go to the Mirror
    Sensation  
    I’m Free  
    We’re Not Gonna Take It  

  8. I was thinking about this recently listening to Brothers In Arms (don’t snigger now).

    If they had trimmed the more poppy, upbeat stuff (maybe put out a separate Money For Nothing EP?) they would have been left with a nice sequence of chilled out, mature songs and they may have been able to claw back a bit of credibility in their legacy. Try this for a sub 40 min LP:

    Side One:
    So Far Away
    Your Latest Trick
    Why Worry

    Side Two:
    Ride Across The River
    The Man’s Too Strong
    Brothers In Arms

    (Plus ditch that horrible cover of course. Ugh.)

    • I could go for that.
      Money For Nothing with it’s mock Satisfaction riff and Sting warbling is far too familiar, and Walk Of Life is stand alone single fodder (a la Twisting By The Pool).

        • I like your truncated version but take issue with your ‘claw back credibility’ comment. One of the biggest selling albums of all times seems to suggest they had plenty of credibility.

            • I have a different take on it. Debut album,Communique and Makin Movies had shedloads of credibility. Love over Gold and Brothers in Arms were where the masses jumped on the bandwagon. They moved onto the next big thing after Brothers in Arms outstayed its welcome. On Every Street was a return to credibility.
              The saving grace of Brothers in Arms was that it earned him enough money to pursue a fantastic solo career where to my mind (and at least one other @niallb) and enabled him to become one of your best songwriters.
              Make no mistake about Mark Knopfler is a very talented musician and a genuine guy to boot. No shame in liking his music.

    • I think it might well be that a lot of the noodling on Dire Straits albums mean a good few of them could do with editing, or at least a trim.
      With my punk and new wave tastes I really ought to be a Straits agnostic. But lots of happy football awayday journeys in the car with my Dad (a big fan) in the early-mid eighties meant I had a lot of opportunity to hear them and now I feel a nostalgic pang when I hear songs like So Far Away, Romeo and Juliet, Brothers in Arms, Angel of Mercy, Lady Writer etc.

  9. If you lose 4 m 18 of “You need your head”, “Rock n Roll Pussy”, “Dogfight Giggle” and “You Don’t Have to Camp Around” from Todd Rundgren’s “A Wizard, A True Star”, it is still 53 minutes 28 seconds of bliss, and I ain’t editing another moment.

    I used to have led zep 1 and 2 on a cassette with “moby dick” much improved by just having the introductory and closing “watch your step” riffs and the drum solo edited out. It also had the best tracks from “Coda” on this, too, if I recall.

      • I love Poor Tom! One of my favourites.

        Actually, the first two Zep albums edited down to a single 45 minute album is a good idea! There’s a lot of filler and blues bluster padding out those two albums. Just thinking what I would keep:

        Good Times Bad Times
        Babe I’m Gonna Leave You
        Your Time is Gonna Come
        Communication Breakdown
        Black Mountainside
        Whole Lotta Love (edited)
        What is and What Never Should Be
        Thank You
        Ramble On
        Moby Dick (edited)

  10. Urgh, so many CD-era albums are far too long. Even listening to a favourite artist can get wearing once 40-45 mins are up (proper listening, not background wallpaper). I was enjoying a perfectly nice new-to-me album just the other day, but once it got to something like track 14 I wanted to fling it out the window.

  11. I used to have a taped copy of Marillion’s Script For A Jesters Tear and Fugazi on two sides of a C90.
    It was probably 3 years before I properly heard the last minutes of Forgotten Sons or Fugazi

  12. Just over, at 46 minutes. But what an album:

    The Magnificent Seven
    Hitsville UK
    Junco Partner
    Something About England
    One More Time
    The Sound Of The Sinners
    Police On My Back
    Midnight Log
    The Equaliser
    The Call Up
    Washington Bullets

  13. Absolutely – it’s the curse of the CD innit? I’m listening to Van Morrison’s new one right now – if he’d pruned 6 of the 14 tracks he’d still have had a full album in old money and it would have been even better for it. The daft thing is that at around 60 minutes it’s a real problem for the vinyl edition which instead of a single record they’ve had to put out as an expensive double album which is about twenty minutes too short.

  14. Just as the CD was encouraging artists to stretch out, Julian Cope brought out Jehovahkill. I was still buying on vinyl at that time. The album was of CD length, which made it neither a single nor a double album, so it came out on three sides (yes Julian, ‘in three phases’); the fourth side was ‘etched’ with the Standing Stones of Callanish. Nice touch. All killer no filler.

  15. I remember the first few times I realised CDs were just too long. Having grown up on 2x 20mins+ sides, when I put a new CD on without having to turn the record over (ah what a lovely expression that is) I still found myself having to stop after that first 45 mins.

    Consequently on first listening I missed the last few tracks. Putting the CD on to listen to the tracks I’d missed felt weird.

  16. 44:48 – 35:25 – 33:10 – 33:50 – 37:47 – 48:24.
    Anyone?
    Timings for the 6 Doors’ LPs.

    My favourites are the middle four (Strange Days to Morrison Hotel) and, rather splendidly, the mean average (is that right?) is 35:03.
    No wonder I play those albums all the time. The perfect length.

    I knew that C at Maths O-Level would come in useful some day.

  17. There are not many single-artist albums on CD that justify being more than about 40 minutes long.
    I think greatest hits/best -of compilations, and especially multi-artist ones, can be given an exemption, though.

    • Does the Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs” justify its 172 minutes and 35 seconds?
      Not quite, but nearly.
      I support if I were being ruthless, I might be able to prune away about 22 minutes of chaff.
      But that still leaves exactly two and a half hours of staggering brilliance.

    • I can think of loads of greatest hits/best ofs with way too many tracks. Abba Gold could lose up to 19 of its tracks and be much better recording because of it. See also……

      • With a compilation of an artist you’re trying out for the first time or of a label you think might be interesting, I think the more the better.
        It gives you more perspective with which to make your judgement.
        If you find it a bit long then you can always take a break somewhere in the middle. Although if you do need a break, then maybe that artist/label aren’t so great..
        On the other hand, with historical artists such as Hank Williams, Louis Jordan or Charlie Parker, whose recordings were mostly 78 RPM singles at the time, it makes perfect sense to fill up the CDs in a “complete recordings” box set to the limit.

  18. When I copied Portishead’s Dummy from my sister’s original cassette I cut out It’s A Fire to get it down to 45 minutes. I played that tape to death. By the time I finally replaced it with a CD at least a decade later I’d completely forgotten about that song, and it still jolts me now, like someone’s stuck something in there that doesn’t belong.

    • I found that most C90 cassettes turned out to be slightly over 90 minutes capacity and things would often just about fit when you were expecting to have to fade the end of the final track. King Crimson’s “Lark’s Tongues In Aspic” surprisingly just fitted onto a side of a TDK SA C90 cassette.

  19. This whole post sounds like a promotion by the CDR manufacturers, to get more people ripping 2 prerecorded CDs on to 1 blank. (Well, it would if it were calling for sub 40 minute recordings.)

  21. Saw Peel’s first Festive 50 (1976) recently.

    The thing that struck me wasn’t the absence of punk, there hadn’t been much punk at that point to be included, but the fact that most of the tracks picked were so long.

    The four Dylan tracks were “Desolation Row,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Visions of Johanna” and “Hurricane.” Don’t go much on the last one, but fair enough I suppose. All the other acts, apart from The Stones (“Brown Sugar,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”), were represented by their long songs. It was a distinct trend, almost as if the voters were thinking to themselves, “Hmmm, if I’m going to have Dylan on the radio, I might as well have him on the radio for a long time.”

    Or was it just that in the mid-1970s many people (men) equated length of song with quality of song?

  22. As a slight alternative, Iron Maiden brought Number Of The Beast UP to 45 minutes on the late 90s remasterd CD.
    Total Eclipse was inserted between Gangland and Hallowed Be Thy Name giving a run time of 44.5 minutes

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