Sequencing Happy Songs of Death
by Ari Koinuma on May.22, 2009, under Ari's Diary, Recording
Marc Gunn‘s Happy Song of Death is mostly mixed except for a stray song whose files aren’t delivered to me for a strange technical problem.
One of my personal favorite part of mixing is having a say in sequencing the songs in the album. I was one of those music geeks who loved making mix tapes, and I get the same pleasure out of playing with song sequences in an album. Putting the pieces together to see how the whole emerges — it’s great fun.
I’m of the opinion that if you string together 10 singles, that may still not make a great album. Songs have characters, and they want to find the right spot among the collection. Obviously, we want to bring the best songs earlier in the sequence, so that they have the chance to be heard more, especially by casual browsers. But the great single doesn’t always make the greatest album opener.
Which was the case with Happy Songs of Death. Don’t get me wrong, there are no bad songs on the record — but some are bigger and catcher sounding than others. We’ve been discussing the sequencing quite a lot, because none of the obvious singles sound suitable for album openers. So for this album, the 1st song is more of a fanfare, a great piece for setting up the rest. The singles are sprinkled throughout, because we didn’t have to spend them all in the first 3 songs.
So if you’re reading this and gets a chance to hear the album, I hope you’ll listen to more than the first couple of songs! It’s shaping up to be a terrific collection, with wonderful variety and diversity that makes it worthy of listening from the beginning to the end.
Incidentally, this experience inspired me to write a little essay on the fine art of sequencing songs. I put that up at SelfSufficientMusician.com, a site where I publish articles for musicians.
