What have we learned?

After 111 albums, almost 10 hours of music and over 93 thousand words.

MUSIC CUE: ‘The Big Ship’ - Brian Eno

Adam Curtis style v/o:

This is a story about hearing the same thing over and over and over again. In May of 2021, I set up a chronological playlist of closing tracks which ballooned to over 500 songs in quick order. So I could give the first year plus of the newsletter some semblance of order, I decided to use Acclaimed Music’s top 100 albums of all time and count them down from 100. The idea behind this was simple. If no one is interested in around 1,000 words on some of the closing tracks from the most revered albums of all time, they wouldn’t be interested in 7,00 words on an album that finished #48 in NME’s albums of 2002 list.¹

So for the last fifteen months, I’ve been listening to that list of closers from those 100 albums. Getting familiar with the less familiar, getting reacquainted with albums I’d not thought about for years and thinking about those very familiar albums in the context of the closing track². I thought this would fit in around my existing listening, but that was just an illusion. My Spotify Wrapped summary has been 95%+ closing tracks for the past two years as a result. I also moved my vinyl collection into my study this year and have been using the turntable to play more contemporary albums offline.

As a result, listening to what essentially amounts to album tracks outside the context of the album they come from can play funny tricks on your brain. Despite the fact that they have nothing to do with each other, I still half expect to hear Wild Beasts’ ‘All The King’s Men’ after Dizzee Rascal/Armand Van Helden’s ‘Bonkers’ because of a 2009 Q1 playlist I made almost 14 years ago. Mash-ups and other Frankenstein pop attempts at the start of the 2000s³ have also meant occasionally, I will hear the intro to ‘Hard To Explain’ or ‘Eple’ and my head will expect to be hearing vocals from Christina Aguilera or Dolly Parton, thanks to Freelance Hellraiser’s ‘A Stroke of Genie-us’ or as As Heard On Radio Soulwax vol 2. So it is no surprise that rather than the silence that I should expect after ‘The Lady In Your Life’, it is ‘Buckets of Rain’ that I now expect to hear and after that, the finale of Dark Side of The Moon. As much as I have enjoyed writing about all most every song so far, I will be glad to see the back of that playlist and look forward to hearing those songs back in the context of their parent albums. But it may be that that won’t matter and that closing tracks playlist is ingrained in my head now, and thinking anything else will be different is just a fantasy.

What I’ve also noticed about writing the entries is the disparity of existing literature on some songs compared to the glut on others. Some songs don’t even have a Wikipedia article, and references in the parent album’s entry are part of the tracklist. On the other extreme, there are other songs on which the Wikipedia article is several thousand words long or documentaries and books that detail how the song was recorded and what the lyrics may be about. I’m particularly pleased that Phoebe Bridgers went through the trouble of explaining what each part of ‘I Know The End’ was about so that a lot of ambiguity went out of the window.

In many ways, the lack of existing writing about a song is an opportunity to pull something together and write 500 or more words on a song than anyone else on the internet ever has. I have also seen that the best response I’ve got on some of the more well-worn songs is when I’ve tried to write about songs in a way where you don’t assume the reader knows what you know about The Beatles’ recordings because they’ve read Ian McDonald or Mark Lewisohn like I have.⁴ But ultimately, that didn't matter.

Finally, I’ve enjoyed the challenge of having the list of what I was going to write about pre-determined in that it pushed me to write about albums I would not have done so soon or maybe at all. This has meant that there has been a decent amount of genres covered. Four jazz albums, folk, electronica, hip-hop, R&B and singer/songwriter have all featured as well the expected pop, rock and indie records.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank all of our readers and subscribers, all 400+ of you, for reading and supporting The Run Out Grooves in 2022 (and for 2021 for those who’ve been here for over a year) and simply going along with it. I hope 2022 has been good for you, and 2023 will be even better. We will be back next week to look at some of the plans for the year and some 2022 closing tracks before our first entry proper for 2023 the week after.

1. Electric Soft Parade’s Holes In The Wall.

2. I own 87 of the 100 on vinyl and seven on CD.

3. A shout out to XFM and the amount of traction they gave to Freelance Hellraiser and Osymyso back at the start of the century by Eddy Temple Morris.

4. And even then, that was 20 years ago, so some information I came to was almost fresh.