Rjinn

Just because you made the topic doesn't mean it's your decision of what goes on. I never said you couldn't analyse, but merely that this never ending over-analysis picking apart structures, choruses, verses and what or how many strokes hooks formulas equations they have = boring has made this topic more dull and dull to read. Which is quite ironic actually.

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Janszoon

It really is. I've been thinking the same thing.

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Trollheart

Holy crap, Jansz??? You're a friggin' ALIEN????!!!

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Dominantdominion

I personally prefer long songs to short. Not all songs can pull it off though. The likes of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin pretty much hit it on the head. It's all down to preference and genre. Pop songs, for example, should never break the 5min mark! It's just too much torture, lol!

Titancross

Funny, as I saw this thread I was listening to 2112 by Rush

Janszoon

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slowtraintokerala

I don't mind a long song if it has the right beat and the right message

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VEGANGELICA

I like analysis, too, for the same reason.

I can hear what you hear in "Estranged." Additionally, I hear that it not only lacks a typical chorus (by "typical" I mean a distinct musical passage with repeated words), but also, like "November Rain," contains many short instrumental solos (six of them, with the longest occuring at 4:00) to break up the song and increase the energy. Having many short instrumental solos, therefore, is another common feature of these two longs songs that you like.

Finally, like "November Rain," "Estranged" has a few repeated lyrics but not many. One verse gets used twice in the song, and the intro (the whispered singing after the seagulls) gets repeated as a reprise around a third of the way through the song. These features weave the song together and help it feel cohesive, while the lack of repetitive lyrics makes the song feel spontaneous. Predicting what would come next lyrically and musically in the song was difficult to do. And you're right: no strings.

"Sowing the Seeds of Love" starts off interesting me...but then the song repeats its "seeds of love" chorus a whopping 24+ times before the song mercifully ends!! If I listened to that song more than once, I'd be crawling up the walls. It's a great example of too much repetition for my tastes. Like Dominantdominion said recently in the thread, "Pop songs [...] should never break the 5 min mark! It's just too much torture, lol!"

(About why back-up singers, who can add variety and change in a long song, are so often female -- I think there are three likely reasons: (1) Many lead vocalists are male and so a higher female voice does not compete with their vocal frequency range; (2) a higher voice sounds more childlike, innocent, ethereal, and people like that "prettiness"; (3) bands like having attractive women to serve as eye-candy on stage during performances.)

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When you find yourself starting to feel bored while reading a post, I recommend you do what I do when I begin to feel a long song is dull or unpleasant: stop and move on to something you like better.

The advantage of only spending your leisure time doing activities you find interesting, Rjinnx, is that you never inflict boredom on yourself. For example, I am never bored listening to music or reading posts here, because I only listen to songs and read posts that I enjoy.

By this reasoning, one could also say it is ironic that people who like long songs get bored by a detailed analysis of them.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying music without knowing why. I prefer to go beyond "I like it" or "I dislike it" to understand the reasons a song appeals to or repels people.

A song that "works" for me is like a movie that engrosses me so much that my disbelief in the story or mood it presents is suspended. When you watch a movie with your disbelief suspended, you forget you are watching a movie because you are involved in it, as if you were in the characters' minds. When something about the movie causes your attention to wander, you break out of the "trance" and realize you're sitting in the theater surrounded by strangers.

A long song is more likely to "lose" me so that I realize, instead of being absorbed in the song, that I am listening to it. A song that I deem "good" makes me feel that the emotions I hear in the song are actually there, existent...when really I'm just listening to a pattern of sound frequencies. So then I start to wonder: what causes a long song to lose my interest? What causes a long song to retain it?

I guess I'm lucky that I enjoy not only listening to music, but also thinking about it, because I get twice the joy from every song, and I can enjoy music even when I hear nothing at all.

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The song "2112" by Rush actually supports the viewpoint that music truncated into increments less than 6 minutes long is more palatable, since "2112" consists of seven distinct movements unified by a storyline but differing musically from each other, the longest of which is less than five minutes long. The song even comes to a full stop after the second movement, "Temples of Syrinx" and before the movements "Oracle: The Dream" and "Soliloquy."

Rush - "2112"
I suspect Rush attempted to prevent boredom by creating distinct movements each of which lasts around 3 minutes. "2112" is an example of a long song that I dislike in part because it is musically disjointed rather than being a cohesive whole...but it's better than it would have been if Rush had taken the first movement and extended it for 20 minutes!


Rush 2112 (Full Song) - YouTube

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ribbons

Just my two cents here. In answer to your question, Erica, whether a song is long or short, melody is key for me. Admittedly, this is the reason why I tend to like short-to-medium songs: usually melody is better "contained" in songs of that length and there are fewer interludial passages breaking up the melody. Even if I'm listening to longer jazz tracks, for instance, melody has got to be there and returned to before too long, or else I lose focus. Maybe I just have a short attention span!