Originally Posted by Trollheart

To be fair to us, I don't think any of us (apart from Janz, and that was obviously in jest) said short songs are bad. I don't think any of us think that. I like a lot of short songs, some are great, but it really has no bearing on whether I enjoy a song or not. Except that if I'm really enjoying a song I'm disappointed when it isn't long enough. The reverse does not apply.

Still, I must ask wisdom: having listened (I don't know how far but) to the Rainbow and Threshold song, do you not now realise that your argument is flawed? Had you come across these songs on your own, it appears from your posts here that you would have discounted them as "too long" and not even bothered listening to them. Now that you have, can you not see what a fallacy it is to refuse to even give a song a chance, just because it's too long? Is this not a sort of musical racial profiling? (note the BIG wink: NOBODY accuse me of hatecrime or anything here please, surely we're not that bloody stupid?)

As for Mostly Autumn and No-Man, why are they boring? Because they're not big exciting openings like the others? But how do you know they don't BECOME that way? They don't but even so... Do you consider anything soft and quiet to be boring? If so then that further limits your scope as to what you may enjoy musically in the future. Go back to "Boh rhap", say it wasn't a well-known classic. Would you still discount it as having a "boring" opening because it's only piano and not listen to it? But then look at what you'd be missing. Can you not see how empty your premise is, how it does not, nay can not work?

Is it just that you're not into prog rock, which is the direction you seem to be aiming most of your criticism about long tracks? If so then fine, not everyone is. But that doesn't invalidate those songs, nor any outside that genre.