What makes an album?

Posted on Fri 03 Jul 09

A few weeks ago, over some red wine and a dram or two of whiskey, the kitchen table debate centred around one question;  what, exactly, is an album?

Is it merely a collection of recordings that happen to have been made over a specific time frame, packaged together and mass-produced? Or shouldn’t it be something more; a coherent piece of work of songs and performances chosen because of the way they fit together? Aren’t the best albums those that build and flow towards something – a resolution or even back to where they started? Wasn’t an album at its best when its length was determined by the work itself, not the data capacity of a soulless plastic disc?

There are twenty finished songs. Some of them have been written and refined over years. Some of them are bare-assed fresh. Some of them feel like a part of something – that thing we have talked about for almost three decades now; an indefinable Blackness – but others don’t – and we don’t know why. All of them are new recordings. So, in the context of what we think is and isn’t Black and what we think is and isn’t an album; how do we want to deal with these nascent who-knows-wares?

We know many people want to hear these songs – we’ve heard you – but over the last few years the distribution channels for music have changed dramatically. CD sales have fallen below the point where they can sustain the retail infrastructure that enabled their distribution. Downloads are taking over and despite falling physical sales, more music than ever before is being consumed (just not always being paid for). There’s an entirely new generation of music lovers who have grown up expecting most of what they listen to be instantly available on demand – and free.

Why should anyone pay for music when so much is available for nothing? The answer we came to was because they want to. We all had listened to music for nothing; whether it was a radio station, an internet stream, a file we’d been sent or downloaded from questionable sources or a record we’d been given by someone who loved the music and wanted to share it. If we loved it too, would we want to pay something for it? Would we want to say ‘thanks’ and hope the artists kept on making records? You bet your ass we would.