I’m a chronic album-listener – self-confessed, guilty as charged. Until two years ago I hardly listened to playlists. I used Spotify’s ‘liked songs’ feature to catalogue tracks I’d picked up from TV shows or TikTok snippets, intending to listen to them in the full context of the album at a later date. This venture has mostly been successful: I’ve managed to comprehensively parse periods and genres I might never have otherwise explored and discovered that nothing is more satisfying than unearthing hidden gems in the middle of a 40-minute runtime. But my to-be-listened list is ever-expanding, and despite my best intentions, my Spotify library remains backlogged with five years’ worth of albums I never got around to.

“′I’ll come back for you’, I tell a 2-minute folksy ballad marooned amidst a stream of up-tempo, densely-layered rock… but we both know it’s a lie”

In the past six months or so, my album-listening habits have dwindled. Like many, I’ve fallen victim to the attention deficit brought on by short-form content and its even shorter samples of music. I’m constantly chasing that six-second hit of something groovy and temporarily exciting, hoping to cling onto it for a few fleeting weeks before it becomes overplayed and insufferable. I confess also to the crime of skipping songs in my few recent album ventures. “I’ll come back for you,” I tell a 2-minute folksy ballad marooned amidst a stream of up-tempo, densely-layered rock… but we both know it’s a lie. Like others before her, she is left to gather dust in my digital record collection.

On a more optimistic note, this recent slip has allowed me to appreciate the appeal of curation. I’ve made six playlists in February alone. It’s thrilling to fashion my own albums, and piecing together 90s college rock and 2000s emo rock feels a lot like making bands shake hands across time (Blake Babies meet Circa Survive) and ushering them onto a stage to play for an audience of one. It’s almost a puzzle: how can I splice songs to evoke one cohesive sound, mood, or memory?

Still, there’s something to be said for listening to the song as God (or rather, the artist) intended. Wedged between pre-selected tracks, you’re hearing a song is at its most authentic. Parts that are obscured when it’s played in isolation suddenly bloom. This is not always so obvious as the last-half medley of Abbey Road, in which the ends and beginnings of each track blend seamlessly together to create a steady, 17-minute effusion of sound. Sometimes a common lyrical motif gains a new meaning, like the loss and melancholia of Pavement’s Terror Twilight. Lyrics which seem at first an ode to heartbreak fuse to reveal a deeper grief over the ending of the band itself. Or, take Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, a record which comes into itself as more than a light and airy blitz of pop when the songs are played in succession. The folk, country and even R&B influences in the instrumentals unfold steadily across its 36 minutes in an effortless exercise in genre-hopping. Sometimes we have to cede to the notion that the artist (and their label) knows best.

“This can seem taxing in an era where we’re accustomed to scrolling away from things that might make us bored, sad, or uncomfortable”

An album is, after all, an experience. If a playlist allows us to leap freely from mood to mood, then an album binds us, whether to sit and stew in a feeling or to whisk us away on an emotional journey. Understandably, this can seem taxing in an era where we’re accustomed to scrolling away from things that might make us bored, sad, or uncomfortable. Some of my friends expressed to me that they struggle with this requirement to focus, so I’d like to offer a few pointers in the hopes that you, reader, can also experience the joys of listening to a full album:

• Make an evening or a morning of it. In the evening, use it as a time to unwind, perhaps before bed. Brew some tea, switch off the big light, and put on a pair of headphones. In the morning, try listening to something new while you ready yourself for the day. Sometimes I like to put on an album after I’ve just woken up and pay careful attention as I toil through the motions of my morning routine. Very often, I’ll have finished it by the time it’s over.

• Alternately, don’t worry about focusing at all. Put it on in the background as you study, cook, or walk. Don’t dwell on the particularities of the song if you don’t feel like it; let certain moments and tracks strike you naturally as your ear picks up what it wants to. This is also a good way to identify your taste, and what kinds of things you’re drawn to musically, which can even help you guess what you might enjoy next.

• Or, for the complete opposite, study it intensely like you would a book. Keep a document or a journal in which you write out your responses to each track. You might even consider maintaining a spreadsheet to log your listening habits!

Finishing a full album can feel like an accomplishment, and in an environment like Cambridge, wherein productivity is paramount and obligations seem never-ending, it can be helpful to find small victories outside of academia. Sometimes, this is cooking a meal for yourself at the end of a day clogged with deadlines, and other times, this is appreciating an hour’s worth of Adrienne Lenker from the warm comfort of your bed.

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