Get Up to Speed with Sequencing: Why Album Song Order Matters Even in the Digital Era

By Tim Ghianni

The art of selecting the sequence of cuts on an album may seem to be vanishing in an age when downloading singles is the rage. But just don´t tell that to Rory Feek or David Nail.

In 2009, each of the two singer/songwriters issued what many would group among the more intriguing Country albums of the year — not just because of their quality, but also because of the thought that went into placing each in the proper place to set the mood or tell a story.

Nail´s I´m About to Come Alive and The Life of a Song, which Feek recorded with wife Joey Martin as Joey + Rory, are both structured so that the music is contained between bookends. What happens in between enhances listening experiences that can be savored from start to finish.

Built around a theme of growing up and away from small-town life, Nail´s album opens with "Mississippi," a wistful meditation on places left behind, written by Scooter Carusoe, Dan Colehour and Chuck Leavell, and closes with another ballad, Nail´s self-penned "Missouri," on which the protagonist sings from home but with a different kind of heartache.

The Joey + Rory album uses "Play the Song," by Feek, and "The Life of a Song," by Patrick Jason Matthews and Rebecca Lynn Howard, to frame songs that evoke an older school of Country, with Bob Wills-flavored dancehall drivers, Emmylou-style heartbreakers, cowboy songs and a dash of sass.

This structure suited the concept of Carl Jackson, whose credits as producer include the Grammy Award-winning Livin´, Lovin´, Losin´: Songs of the Louvin Brothers as well as The Life of a Song. He began work with the duo by culling through song possibilities before settling on the bookend/song cycle concept. From that point, they arranged the cuts according to subject and tempo, with the goal of carrying the listener all the way through.

"There´s a couple of different ways to look at sequencing, but it´s still very important, as far as I´m concerned," Jackson said. "I look at an album as an event. I like to listen to an album all the way through and be entertained. It starts with great songs and you try to put them in an order that´s very pleasing to the listener."

Jackson´s approach is informed strongly by his history as a singer and master of the banjo. His résumé goes back to being hired at 14 by Jim and Jesse McReynolds, a brief foray in The Country Store, a bluegrass group with Keith Whitley, Jimmy Gaudreau and Bill Rawlings and a long run with Glen Campbell. Through these and other experiences he learned the importance of pacing, whether onstage or on albums.

"As much as I love ballads — ballads are my favorite things in the world and it wouldn´t bother me to have an album of nothing but ballads — you want to cut some up-tempo things and place them throughout the album," Jackson said. "You don´t really want to have three or four ballads right in a row any more than you want three or four up-tempo things in a row."

Mike Wrucke, who produced Nail´s album with Frank Liddell, also puts much thought into the track order. "You try to get a good flow from song to song," he said, adding that "it´s cool when you are working with an artist who has a vision."

A vision that appreciates the album format is perhaps rarer than it was just a few years ago. "Today, a lot of people are so single-driven — you know, release this song to iTunes for downloading," Wrucke observed. Hastening to add that he doesn´t see anything wrong with that, the producer clarified that it just isn´t the way he prefers to work.

"I love albums," he emphasized. On I´m About to Come Alive as well as Miranda Lambert´s catalog, all of which he also produced with Liddell, "I just wanted to make more of an album, rather than look for the perfect three-minute single that´s safe and easy for radio."

One of the critical tracks on the Nail album, in Wrucke´s estimation, is "Missouri." Running a full four minutes, it´s far from the bite-size, happily-ever-after tunes considered ideal for radio, a point Nail seems to underscore by singing the title with the pronunciation "misery." But why take it even further by framing his album with two down tempo tunes? According to Nail, that idea guided him right from the start. "I had 10 or 15 different playlists with the songs in different order on my iPod," he said, but those two always remained at the front and the back of the sequence.

To help him arrange the material between those two, Nail kept the album´s premise in mind. "It does take a theme of small-town kid who moves to the city," he explained. "He couldn´t wait to get out of this small town, felt that small town was holding him back, but when he gets there he kind of struggles and he longs for that small-town way of life again.

"It was very much my story," he added, noting that this yearning for small-town life has subsided somewhat since his marriage last June to Catherine Werne. "Now we want something in between."

To document the tale he envisioned for I´m About to Come Alive, Nail assembled a list of songs that included the title track, recorded originally by the rock band Train, as well as his own co-writes with partners including Kenny Chesney and veteran session keyboardist Chuck Leavell, whose Georgia-woods flavored playing augmented the album´s mood.

And then Nail stepped back to reflect more generally on how he likes to listen to music. "I wanted to have it almost come across as a movie to the people listening," he said. "I wanted it to kind of ease you in and ease you out, with some intense moments in the middle.

"I spent so many days of my life listening to records in cars," he continued. "I always liked it when someone can put this record in for an hour and drive and get to the end and say, ´I listened to it from top to bottom a couple of times and it seemed to move effortlessly.´ It always bothered me when people would cut three singles and the rest of the songs on the album were kind of average. I felt that especially in today´s time, if someone is going to spend $10 on a record, you should give them something."

Nail wasn´t just using Country artists as his models when mulling over his song sequence. As he shuffled his playlists, he kept thinking back to albums from the ´60s and ´70s he listened to while riding around in the car with his father, a band director and music enthusiast. In particular, he recalled the work of The Beatles, Glen Campbell and Elton John, who fashioned the "real, authentic, unique, classic-sounding record" he aspired to make.

"I referenced that time period," he explained. "If you are going to copy something, it might as well be the best."

Similarly, Feek looked to the classic stylists and even particular albums while working on the song order for The Life of a Song. "I´m extremely Country," he insisted. "But the album that stood out for me [while sequencing] is Bruce Springsteen´s Nebraska. I got to listen to that album a lot on reel-to-reel when I was stationed [with the U.S. Marine Corps] in Japan. I remember falling in love with it. The sequencing and the story line were huge to me."

Though he wanted "those same kinds of messages and threads" running through his Joey + Rory debut, the stark Midwestern tale spun by the Boss wasn´t the kind of material Feek hoped to emulate. And so he broadened his reference to include another favorite album, The Best of Don Williams, Vol. 2. "You can remember 30 years later what was cut number four on the Don Williams album," he said, adding that he and his wife "like the old albums and concept albums that you could listen to from beginning to end. So, we spent a lot of time in trying to make the best possible decisions for the record."

With producer Jackson, they agreed that the sassy "Play the Song" and the to-the-point title track would work as bookends. "The message of the album is that at the end of the day it comes down to the songs, that the song is the most important thing here," Feek noted. Once that was established, focus shifted to ensuring that the pacing and placing of the rest of the material worked well — in particular because the set included a dramatic rearrangement of a landmark song, Lynyrd Skynyrd´s "Free Bird." Their decision was to not position it too close to the top.

"The thought process was that it´s a classic song that´s important to people," Feek said. "When you are remaking something, it feels like it´s something you don´t want to insert early on. We needed to establish some credibility as singers and songwriters before we reached it." And that credibility was confirmed big-time by positioning the catchy single, "Cheater Cheater," by Feek, Martin, Kristy Osmunson and Wynn Varble, in the cleanup position at number four.

Looking back on The Life of a Song, Jackson reflected that technology has had an impact on sequencing strategies. Back when his father was a radio deejay, slapping vinyl on the turntable, singles were often the first and last cuts on each side of an album, making it easier to find and spin frequently enough to make them hits.

With CDs, though, Jackson noted that listeners have "instant access" — the ability to jump right to the hit or let the entire album play out. "I think sequencing is just as important now as it´s ever been," he concluded, "but probably for different reasons."

2010 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Photo: David Nail; Credit: Andrew Southam