I’ve been working on figuring out the order that the songs will appear on the (still nameless) CD. I should start by saying that there are people who think it doesn’t matter at all – that in this era of iPods and buying music online no one pays attention to the order of songs or even conceptualizes things as albums. But I do, and my guess is that others in the folk genre do as well. I still listen, even if it’s more likely on an iPod or a computer, to CDs all the way through. And if a DJ is trying to decide whether to play my music on the radio that person is still, at least initially, encountering it on a shiny round disc and hearing songs sequentially. So I put a lot of thought into the order in which those songs are placed. All hail iTunes for the ability to move things around! I’ve been able to come up with a plan, put the songs in that order, and listen. Things have changed a bit as the production has become more and more complete, but as I’ve been listening through for production issues/ideas I’ve always has the tracks in an intended order (which has changed over time) so I could hear how they sounded next to each other. I’m working with a number of principles. For the last CD I asked Maura Kennedy and Tracy Grammer, two of my music mentors, how they think about conceptualizing song order on CDs. I’ve also listened to what works or doesn’t work for me on other CDs. So my guiding principles are: -Start strong and build. To some extent I want to front-load the best songs and the best production; those are what people hear first, and I want them to want to listen to/play the rest of the CD. Both Tracy and Maura, in slightly different ways, suggested that the second or third song (rather than the first) should be the best song on the CD; the first song gets them listening, but it’s the second or third that they’ll pay the most attention to. -Start representative. But it also means that the first few songs, especially, and the first song most importantly, need to be representative of the CD. Maybe more exciting than the norm, but not songs that give a false sense of what to expect. (That was my concern initially with If I’d Known, once I decided it would be a good first song – I didn’t want it to sound so different from the rest of the CD that people would get the wrong impression of what would follow.) -End strong (but perhaps mellow). The last song on the CD also matters; it has a more prominent place than others in the middle, and should be a song with meaning and with the right sort of message for ending the CD. -Vary everything from song to song. Key, tempo, length, topic, instrumentation, mood. On the one hand, I don’t want to give people whiplash when listening to the CD, but it doesn’t make sense to put three long slow songs backed by violin in a row; it’s much more interesting for the overall experience, and people will pay more attention to the songs, if they don’t all sound the same. That latter injunction is the one that’s been giving me trouble in the last 24 hours. I’d settled on a track order I was really happy with, through many listens. But the version I’d been listening to didn’t yet have Pete and Maura’s additions on The Best Art, and they changed things. In some ways, they couldn’t change most things – the key, the topic (even the instrumentation, since what they added was different from anything else on the CD), the tempo all stayed the same, obviously. But their additions really changed the mood – made it more low-key, sweeter, and it even feels (although it obviously isn’t) slower. Because I front-loaded the higher energy songs, the end of the CD is lower-energy, and I suddenly worried that I might have too many slow-feeling songs in a row. (I do remember, though, Tracy advising slowing things down at the end of the CD.) But I’ve tried other alternatives and can’t find anything I like better. (It’s not as simple as swapping the order of two songs, because so many factors went in to where the songs are placed – the obvious swaps would lead to songs in the same key next to each other, or songs with the same instrumentation.) So I’m probably going to stick with the order I’ve been working with. But stay tuned – in a couple months you can find out for yourselves what the final order is. Here’s what I’ve got, for those of you who are curious: If I’d Known Crawfordsville, Indiana The Chicken Song (The Meaning of Life) Take Me To Tallahassee Leaving in Three-Quarter Time Fun Will Find A Way Cross That River Resolution Fiddle Player The Friends That I Need The Best Art Ex-Voto Many Paths