FYI

in this day of digital and 80 minute capacity CD's i was surprised at the total time of 2 recent releases.

kim richey - chinese boxes - under 34 minutes

suzanne vega - beauty and crime - under 35 minutes.

Renny: funny you should bring this up--I'm listening to Nick Lowe's new one At My Age here at work, and it fits 12 songs into a tidy 33 mins (plus a few extra seconds).

It is strange, since in the early days of CDs, I EXPECTED CDs to be much longer. The older I get, the more I realize I'd rather have quality over quantity! While I wouldn't have minded a few extra songs on either of those releases, there's not a single second wasted! By the way, the Vega release has an extra song on iTunes (also on the Japanese version), but at 1:50, it doesn't add too much extra time!

off the top of my head, the shortest full-length album i can recall is neil young's "everybody's rockin".

clocks in at just under 22 minutes if i recall correctly.

renny

Some of the newies would actually be pretty good if they had lopped off say one third of the songs.

agree with you there googamooga! that's why i don't think i mind these short new releases... in fact, i think that anything longer than 50 minutes is generally too long for my attention span anymore!

I was shocked when I played "The Pick Of Destiny", the new Tenacious D. album, in my car and it ended only thirty-three minutes and forty-six seconds after it began. Turns out, however, that the CD was actually a "soundtrack" and not a full-fledged album (you couldn't tell by the price tag). On the other hand, in 1993, Guns 'N Roses put out "The Spaghetti Incident?" a 46 minute, twelve song album that they called an EP (and to their credit, priced as such), probably mostly because it contained all cover songs. Paris Hilton's 2006 album "Paris" is less than forty minutes long, shorter than any of the three remix singles it generated.

I think the music industry has always been full of such extremes, however. Bob Dylan's "Nashville Skyline" was 29 minutes long, yet four years earlier, his "Highway 61 Revisited was 51 minutes long.

Unless it is a live cd or best of, I feel that anything over 60 minutes is like a 2 1/4 hour movie (always certain exceptions). There are things that can be easily cut and not destroy the movie or the disc.

"Meet The Smithereens" at 28:03. Since they're recreating "Meet The Beatles" , I guess it's not that big of a surprise!

Jeff