Track titles - soppy or crucial?

[palazzo]

I’m new here, so be gentle.

I’ve been a big huge Cocteaus fan for ages (20 years!) and have experienced them in many formats – cassette compilations with them mixed up with Dead Can Dance and Dif Juz in the 80s, mini discs set to random in the 90s, and iPod playlists in all sorts of orders just recently. But in all these format changes I’ve never found the track titles to be important to me. In fact I usually find them rather twee and meaningless and so tend to blot them out.

But checking up on whether to buy the new reissues I found a reviewer on Amazon castigating another reviewer for saying Track 1 and Track 6 and not mentioning the titles which were, for him, crucial to his enjoyment of the music.

Do you all agree with him or me?

[mmmender]

"a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

[keefy]

I go out of my way to avoid tracklists. I intentionally try to make it a blur. I listent to everything coast to coast so I tend to know the title of the album or EP (or the A-side of the single), and leave it at that.

All my mp3s are albums/ep's/shows ripped as one file anyway, so you're not alone in not being "in" with track titles.

[Dewayne]

Yeah, you're definetly not alone on that. I think that the titles of cocteau twins songs are so off the wall sometimes that i just don't remember them.

[Lucibelle]

Yeah, I don't associate too many songs with their titles either. I think track titles are most important to people trying to get their songs on the radio. That's when you want a title that's easy to associate with it's song. Lowest common denominator, you know. ;)

[Clayton39]

Mostly all of my music is MP3, and its usually just a matter of adding a folder in and letting it play. I dont know the track listings to some of my favorite albums.

[Ghosty]

They're not crucial but they're not totally unimportant either. I still tend to listen to albums in their original sequence since the song order is one of the artists choices in making an album a work of 'art'. You tend to remember the titles better when you play the album as a whole I think. But CT song titles are the ones I have the most trouble with, like with BBK I can barely remember the first three, let alone the rest of the album.
I mean, Spooning Good Singing Gum...I think I WANT to forget it.

[Baba O'Reilly]

Originally posted by mmmender
"a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

Who uttered those immortal lines mend?

[Phil Lawton]

Originally posted by Christian S.
Who uttered those immortal lines mend?

Percy Thrower.

[Baba O'Reilly]

Who's he?

[Phil Lawton]

Originally posted by Christian S.
Who's he?

He muttered those immortal lines....and probably mentioned John Innes Compost No.2 at the same time.

[palazzo]

Originally posted by Phil Lawton
He muttered those immortal lines....and probably mentioned John Innes Compost No.2 at the same time.

Stop teasing with your arcane Brit references - it was William Shakespeare, a man who knew what to do with his John Innes too, it is said.

[Baba O'Reilly]

Well name checked pal - pray, was it taken from one of his sonnets or plays?

[frarn]

Originally posted by palazzo
But in all these format changes I’ve never found the track titles to be important to me. In fact I usually find them rather twee and meaningless and so tend to blot them out.


an interesting thought, and I think I agree with you regarding titles - I can very rarely identify a CT track by name if I hear the tune playing, although I can normally name the album it is off ....

by the by, I listen to a lot of music while driving and have noticed that I can normally start singing the next track on the album as a track ends, in other words I seem to have some innate sub conscious "track-list" mechanism (or maybe its time to change the CD's in the car steres's jukebox??) ..... anyone experience something similar?

[palazzo]

Originally posted by frarn
I listen to a lot of music while driving and have noticed that I can normally start singing the next track on the album as a track ends, in other words I seem to have some innate sub conscious "track-list" mechanism (or maybe its time to change the CD's in the car steres's jukebox??) ..... anyone experience something similar?

Undoubtedly, even sometimes when it's just a compilation of my own that I play a lot. This is one of the reasons that random functions are so good - they confound that expectation and give new pleasure. I read somewhere that the joy of music is all about having your expectations either met or confounded.

[Moya xx]

I don't think they're crucial. I'm in agreement that, with CT's it doesn't seem to matter - it's more the album as a whole. However, I do think they've come up with some corking song titles.

[keefy]

One of the things that does get me about the song titles was when someone would request one. I remember being at a CT show in New York where they were between songs and the crowd quieted down ..... this lone voice called out from a distance:

"A KISSED OUT RED FLOAT-BOAT!"

It sent everyone (including the band) into a giggle fit, and naturally they played it next. :-)

[frarn]

Originally posted by palazzo
This is one of the reasons that random functions are so good - they confound that expectation and give new pleasure.

... and I just discovered how to set the random function on the car stereo! senses be prepared to be confounded!

:confused:

[Ghosty]

Originally posted by frarn
by the by, I listen to a lot of music while driving and have noticed that I can normally start singing the next track on the album as a track ends, in other words I seem to have some innate sub conscious "track-list" mechanism ...anyone experience something similar?
I get that all the time! It's so bad I even start to anticipate the next song while the one playing isn't even finished! There's something to be said for random playing I guess.

Back in the prehistoric days of LP's I even used to anticipate where the scratches were on the record and sort of missed them when they weren't there (like on CD).

[ossian]

hey but you must admitt they look just great on the sleeves. you can't say they all exactly describe the songs, but some of them would make me think of beautiful sort of unreal things, just the strange juxtapositions of words... i can't really see why some people found it soppy. it totally fit the whole cocteau thing to me. it doesn't really matter what they were, but it was great to have them there as they were anyway. still, some are better than others i guess. "green" sounds much better than "touch upon touch" to me...

[willy]

Originally posted by Phil Lawton
Percy Thrower.

A once-famed sound mimic he guested on Kate Bush's The Dreaming album; making digging, mowing and pruning noises on one track.

Dead Can Dance immortalised him in Percythrown (The Gathering of Flowers).

The cunt can't have been that popular though - vandals attacking his Blue Peter garden.

[palazzo]

Originally posted by GhostFace
Back in the prehistoric days of LP's I even used to anticipate where the scratches were on the record and sort of missed them when they weren't there (like on CD).

Me too! There's a track on Stevie Wonder's Innervisions that still doesn't sound right without the jumps on my old vinyl version.

The Shakespeare quoted by our esteemed mistress is from Romeo and Juliet, by the way. 'What's in a name?' indeed.

[noboybands]

Originally posted by keefy
I go out of my way to avoid tracklists. I intentionally try to make it a blur. I listent to everything coast to coast so I tend to know the title of the album or EP (or the A-side of the single), and leave it at that.


a friend of mine (another cocteau fan) is like that, whereas i have to know the title. i suppose that's another example of the differences between an anal gay man and his straight female friend

[noboybands]

Originally posted by Christian S.
Well name checked pal - pray, was it taken from one of his sonnets or plays?

i think it was taken from a seed catalogue

[dprid]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/shropshire/features/2003/08/images/percy_thrower_150.jpg

[Avninder]

I still don't know the titles of many of their songs. I'm too lazy to remember stuff like "The Itchy Glow Bow Blow" and "Ella Megalast Burls Forever". Come on! To me, they mean so much more to the band than they do for me. Therefore, I usually refer to their albums and track numbers instad of by individual song titles.

[johncool]

Hum... I remember most of the titles of the songs and I associate the songs to the titles, but sometimes I can't remember their order in the albums/EPs.

[palazzo]

OK, so what say we forget the titles and just number the songs from 1 to whatever, to make things easier.

47 is my current fave, but I'm getting into 177-182 following the remastering.

And April 1st is long passed.