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Award Show Commentary

Written by Jeff Krasky

Country music has deep-rooted tradition. New artists respect well established stars that are currently burning up the charts and also the artists who paved the way for them. Well, most do. While tradition is a wonderful thing the myth that country albums need to be short needs to die a quick death.

I decided to perform an experiment to test the “pathetically short country album” theory. Here’s how it worked. I walked over to one of my CD racks and randomly grabbed three country albums and three albums from other genres. I then compared the releases on two criterions, the number of tracks and the total run time.

The test subjects were:

1. Sheryl Crow The Globe Sessions
2. Alanis Morisette Jagged Little Pill
3. 10,000 Maniacs The Earth Pressed Flat
4. Bruce Robison Long Way Home From Anywhere
5. John Michael Montgomery Home To You
6. Chely Wright Single White Female

Below are the results when looking at the two criterions:

Sheryl Crow The Globe Sessions
Tracks: 11 and a hidden track
Run time: 59:43

Alanis Morisette Jagged Little Pill
Tracks: 12 plus two hidden tracks
Run time: 57:33

10,000 Maniacs The Earth Pressed Flat
Tracks: 13
Run time: 55:40

Bruce Robison Long Way Home From Anywhere
Tracks: 10
Run time: 36:11

John Michael Montgomery Home To You
Tracks: 10
Run time: 31:23

Chely Wright Single White Female
Tracks: 10
Run time: 38:44

The results are interesting. Country music got beat on the number of tracks included on each album, with 12 being the lowest for the rock/pop genre and 10 being the highest amount included on a country release (in the sampling, I realize that there are albums with more tracks, but this is a random sampling). Country music was absolutely slaughtered in the run time category. The shortest of the rock/pop albums was 55:40 minutes compared to a pathetic 31:23 for John Michael Montgomery’s release.

By now you’re probably wondering what my point is. It’s simple. More music please! It’s a shame that an album that is packing around a half-hour worth of music goes for the same amount of cash as an album that contains almost double that. But it does. Why more music? I can come up with a few good reasons.

1. You might enjoy it for a longer period of time. Nothing more annoying than putting an album on and turning around in what seems like ten minutes and staring blankly at your stereo wondering why in the hell it’s over already.
2. In a word, value. Am I the only person on the planet that thinks about value anymore? If I continually purchased 30 minute long albums I’d soon be found digging around under the couch for spare change to feed my addiction. More music means more value and I don’t think you’ll find anyone complaining too much.

Why won’t the country music industry give us more music? Here are a few possible reasons.

1. Putting as little music as possible on an album means that they can get a new album out there quicker and take a little bit more money sooner. You have to love it when you get taken to the cleaners.
2. Producers can’t remain conscious long enough to produce more tracks.
3. Record label executives failed their economics classes in high school.
4. The four or five big songwriters can’t churn out enough material. You know that whole write your own material deal? It seems like a deadly sin in Nashville.

To be fair the industry has gotten slightly better. I grabbed another couple of country releases. This time making sure that they contained more than ten tracks to see how they hold up compared to the rock/pop albums. Being all wise and an incredible talent (haha) I matched up one album to each of the track numbers found on the three rock/pop albums.

Our test dummies are:

Susan Ashton Closer
Deana Carter Everything’s Gonna Be Alright
Tim McGraw A Place In The Sun

The results are:

Susan Ashton Closer
Tracks: 12
Run time: 46:54

Deana Carter Everything’s Gonna Be Alright
Tracks: 13
Run time: 54:01

Tim McGraw A Place In The Sun
Tracks: 14
Run time: 54:07

The results are much more promising on this series of country release than the previous ones. The problem is that far to little of the industry subscribes to this longer album policy. It would be nice to think that we are entitled to the same amount of music as other genres, at least most of the time. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Hopefully we will continue to see progress in this area but until then….got music?

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