Long live the LP

Full-length albums remain strong, despite the popularity of singles via iTunes. (Getty)

Since changing her name to Issa in June of 2006, Canadian singer Jane Siberry has toured and travelled constantly. By her own estimate, she’s also written three albums’ worth of new material. Issa recently posted an eight-minute song, Wilderness Wheel/Willow, for download at Sheeba, her online store. Sometime next year, she plans to make all 33 of her new songs available, including a portion of them on an actual compact disc (released in limited quantities, on recycled paper).

“There’s so much demand for it,” Issa (pronounced “Eee-sah”) said in a recent telephone interview. “It is a different way of honouring the music, too. There’s still something sort of cheap about just making the music available for downloading.”

Could it be? Issa, that bellwether artist for online music delivery, is returning to the world of physical CDs? In 2005, Siberry shut down Sheeba Records and put her entire catalogue online. Soon, she was spearheading a “self-determined pricing” policy, an innovation recently co-opted by Radiohead. But Issa isn’t out to abandon either medium. The old-fashioned idea of an album, she says, has always been central to her art.

“People want to be told stories,” she observed, speaking from Malibu, Calif., on the final leg of a three-month North American tour. “They want to go on an adventure with someone they trust for longer than five minutes. That will never die. A longer story in the hands of a good storyteller is a better story. The format? Ah, that’s just a stopping-station.”

Recording artist Issa, formerly known as Jane Siberry. (Jason George/Issalight.com)

Modern music may, indeed, be irreversibly fragmented. Comprising both downloads and chain record stores, the business of selling music is a tangled, sprawling mess. Despite a growing sense — both real and imagined — that online, single-song sales rule, the album is in no jeopardy of disappearing. Talk to musicians and avid listeners and you’ll see that albums still matter. Regardless of how it’s delivered, the album, that unified assembly of songs, is still the most powerful (and effective) medium musicians have.

“To me, people are looking at this the wrong way round,” observes David Barker, the New York-based editor of Continuum’s 33 1/3, an ongoing series of books dedicated to many of popular music’s touchstone recordings. The series includes Joe Pernice’s Meat Is Murder, a novella based on the 1985 Smiths record of the same name; out this month is Toronto critic Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Wilson immerses himself in Celine Dion’s 1999 disc in order to meditate on taste, pop culture and fame.

“The album,” Barker continues, “is actually the natural format for music.” Look at other art forms, such as movies or novels, he says: the longer format is absolute. “There is no pop chart for short movies,” he says. “Can you sell a short story as a single unit on its own? No, you can’t. Can you sell a single poem on its own? No, you can’t. It seems odd to me that the pop single, as wonderful as it is, has become this de facto thing, that this is how you can listen to music.”

For Issa, and for many musicians, an album is simply the equivalent of a single live set. “Whether it’s vinyl or CD or whatever, it’s simply a reflection of a concert, the time it takes to tune into the person who’s performing,” she explains. The length of it, from approximately 45 minutes to an hour, “has more to do with our nature than a format.”

(Universal Music Group)

That desire for a longer, more complex musical narrative has certainly fed the recent upsurge in LP nostalgia. Barker didn’t create the 33 1/3 series because he felt the album was under threat, even if some of have interpreted it that way. Earlier this year, Da Capo Books republished Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, venerable rock critic Greil Marcus’s 1979 anthology of essays; they also commissioned a sequel, Marooned. The premise is simple: 20 critics, each of them hypothetical castaways, stuck with a single disc for all time.

In the MP3 era, doesn’t the iTunes shuffle reign supreme? Not at all, says Phil Freeman, Marooned’s New Jersey-based editor, who filled the book’s introduction with a defence, and a justification. The album still thrives in every genre; it remains, above all, a musician’s “chosen mode of expression.”

“I really think artists continue to think in those terms,” he said, during a telephone interview from the Manhattan office of Metal Edge, the heavy-metal magazine he edits. Freeman offers hip hop as an example, a genre often regarded by critics as singles driven. He calls Jay-Z’s latest, American Gangster, a concept album, “which is about as ’70s rock as you can get.” In a recent Los Angeles Times piece, Freeman singled out the “album showdown” between Kanye West (Graduation) and 50 Cent (Curtis) this fall as a “prime example of how albums can still make a mass-market splash.” Together, the two discs sold more than 1.5 million copies in their first week.

Freeman isn’t an atypical 35-year-old: his tastes range from classic metal (his Marooned essay is on Motorhead) to Steely Dan (his second choice for the anthology) to Miles Davis (Freeman’s book Running the Voodoo Down is about Davis’s electric period). Record executives talk of the album’s death, he says, because sales have dropped, down 15 per cent in the first half of 2007 from the same period in ’06. But Freeman thinks record execs misunderstand teenagers. Read the blogs, Freeman suggests. “Teenagers are just as obsessed with albums as they ever were. Now it’s My Chemical Romance when it used to be the Cure, but they’re still poring over the lyrics and writing them on their notebooks.”

(EMI Music Canada)

Still, teen culture has its limits. Think of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, originally released as an album of 78s in 1940. Or Frank Sinatra’s string of Capitol recordings, beginning with In the Wee Small Hours in 1955. Or even contemporary singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens’s mythic 50 states project, which began with Greetings from Michigan four years ago. Pop music, jazz, folk, it doesn’t matter — overarching themes or moods or stories will always need, as Issa suggests, more than five minutes of a listener’s time.

New York-based, Vancouver-raised saxophonist Michael Blake has demonstrated this for years. His latest disc, Amor de Cosmos, is a series of improvisations and compositions based on his family’s early pioneering history. His 1997 debut, Kingdom of Champa, was a soundscape that somehow wedded the music of Vietnam with Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain.

“I grew up with rock and soul music, so it took me a while to see the same sensibility of the ‘classic album’ in jazz,” he explained in an e-mail interview, citing Duke Ellington’s The Queen’s Suite and Far East Suite as his entry points. “Ellington really understood this idea of presenting a complete picture for the listener in less than an hour.”

Yet Blake, a onetime member of the Lounge Lizards, sees a wild hybrid at work in his music. Davis and John Coltrane are influences, but so are the Beatles, and records as different as Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and the Clash’s London Calling. Blake remembers investigating Pink Floyd, even though he wasn’t a fan, because “I could see and hear something going on there, the big picture.”

The big picture will always be the album’s defining feature. Even Issa, whose creativity online has made her a magnet for technophiles, sees the larger arc, the unifying force of the album.

“That’s the essence of it for me,” she says. “Everything else is an aside.”

Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer.

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