Unknown Soldier

There is an easy way for you to enjoy long songs and that is after 6 mins to just press stop and move onto the next song, end of problem.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

VEGANGELICA

Metallica's "Wherever I May Roam" is a great example of a song that overuses repetition, in my opinion. The song has a lot going for it musically, but I would also like it more if it were shorter...and not just by stopping it early but by cutting parts from the middle.

First, what I like about "Wherever I May Roam": the song's Middle Eastern touches at the beginning; the somber, desolate feel of the song; the way the beginning picks up energy, becoming more forceful and frenzied as it progresses through the first minute.

Yet after the first minute, the sound of the music is very consistent with little musical progression, and the pattern of the repeated verses and chorus remains approximately the same to the end, with a total of four repetitions of a stanza that uses almost the same words in each repetition. What's worse is that three of those repetitions occur one right after the other! Metallica's tendency to overuse repetition in this song also shows up at the end, where they repeat "wherever I may roam" six times as the music fades.

I feel Metallica should have cut two of the three nearly identical repetitions of the chorus to shave a minute off the song without losing any content musically or lyrically. METALLICA]METALLICA - WHEREVER I MAY ROAM LYRICS - WHEREVER I MAY ROAM LYRICS

The song as is just doesn't have enough musical or lyrical variety and contrast to engage me right to the end. Repeating any section of a song more than three times makes it likely to become boring to me.

Your example of Richard Marx's song "Keep Coming Back" reminds me of one of the first long songs I disliked and feel would have benefited from editing: Iron Butterfly's 17-minute "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."

Iron Butterfly's full length "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" begins and ends with short singing sections but wanders off after 2 minutes through long and, to my mind, boring guitar, drum, and organ instrumental solos that together last over ten minutes. The solos feel very self-indulgent to me. Probably fun to play, they go on far too long. I think this song would have been much more powerful had the solos been edited down to 30 seconds each (rather than approximately 3 minutes each).

I learned today that an edited version of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" was created for radio and lasts only 2:56. I like this shorter version better than the original, although I feel it is missing some of the power that comes from the drum solo. I think they would have made a more dramatic edited version if they had kept short versions of the three instrumental solos to retain more of the flavor of the original...just not so much of its unnecessary, rambling length. They edited out all of the instrumental solos, draining the song of some of its energy and uniqueness, so this version is too short. But I still like it more than the 17 minute original, which was too long!

Now below is a version of the song that I feel is just right.

Slayer's cover of the song has the perfect time length, instrumentation, and style for me:

Slayer - "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (Cover)
This cover has power and energy and never drags or gets lost in itself, unlike the 17-minute original.


Slayer - In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - YouTube

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Unfortunately, just pressing stop after 6 mins doesn't necessarily solve the problem of a song's feeling too long to a listener. (I don't think you meant this as a serious suggestion, but I will pretend.)

Because the whole musical form of a song usually differs depending on its length (Musical form - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), the beginning of any song is typically affected by the song length that the musicians plan.

So, as wisdom explained, a long song may not appeal to some people during its first 6 minutes because they don't care for the form that is followed:

Simply stopping a long song at minute 6, therefore, won't necessarily make the experience of the song a pleasant one.

A perfect example is Iron Butterfly's original 17-minute version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." If you stop after 6 minutes, you will end right in a guitar solo, such that you have only heard the main guitar riff, a bit of singing, a guitar solo and then...nothing. This listener-truncated version of the song lacks coherance.

I've listened to the full 17-minute original several times in my life (because a friend liked it). I find that stopping at 6 minutes is preferable to going all the way to the end...but stopping still doesn't make me like those first 6 minutes!

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