One of my favorite features of Apple Music is the ability to call up any album throughout time and listen within seconds. After seeing A Complete Unknown in the theater, I spent a few days finally listening to Bob Dylan’s early work and wondering why I waited until I was in my seventies to listen to the original canon.
The other day I called up one of Amy Grant’s best albums, Lead Me On, because I was too lazy to walk down into the basement and haul up the LP that I’ve owned since it was new back in 1988. It was a nice album to have in the background while I did my usual business on the laptop.
But then the music jumped into the foreground.
The eighth song — the third song on Side B — is a love song to God called “All Right.” As it faded out, my subconscious mind braced for the next song, “Sure Enough,” the 10-song album’s triumphant penultimate song.
Instead I began hearing a funky song I had never heard before. Had I daydreamed through the last two songs and Apple Music started playing “more songs like this”? I called up the app and discovered that no, Track 9 of Lead Me On is something called “Wait for the Healing.”
It turns out that Lead Me On has 12 songs if you bought the cassette or compact disc. “Sure Enough” is not the penultimate song; it’s “If You Have to Go Away,” another piece I had never heard before.
Thirty-seven years ago, I had fallen victim once again to the stupid practice of leaving songs off the vinyl version of an album to emphasize that cassettes and CDs could accommodate more music than the lowly LP.
It was fun to discover “bonus tracks” after more than 30 years, but it also scratched an old irritation. The music industry tried to kill off the LP that way — why buy vinyl when you could get more songs in the other formats?
Oddly, the worst examples were contemporary Christian music records. Phil Keaggy’s terrific LP Sunday’s Child had 12 songs, but the CD had 13. Grant’s compilation album The Collection featured 10 great songs from her career to that point, unless you bought it on cassette — with 15 songs — or CD — then you got 17.
The happy ending is that the LP survived those other two formats and has gained some semblance of acceptance again — it’s the most popular choice for people who want physical copies of their music. The sad thing is LP buyers like me didn’t experience the full greatness of one of Amy’s greatest albums until years or, in my case, decades later.
Disruption in the music industry has led to better products, and people who like vinyl aren’t punished for their choices anymore.
Nowadays record companies generally avoid such foolishness. If an album doesn’t fit comfortably on two sides, It’s configured as a two-record set. The most interesting example I’ve encountered is Bruce Springsteen’s Letters to You album, which covers three sides and has artwork etched into what would have been Side 4.
I like happy endings.
