I've never worried about how long the song is.
You can't just release double albums and expect people to sit there and devote their time to it.
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Especially in repetitive music, to make a long piece of music you have to be extremely skilled in your sleight of hand. Just to make long form music it's very difficult and you really have to consider what you're putting someone through.
Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America.
It's a double-headed coin, because technology is a convenience but it's stifled our attention spans. At one time, albums had songs that were like ten minutes long, with different variations and chord progressions and changes.
If a song is longer than three and a half minutes, it'll need something to keep you entertained.
It does make sense to put on some songs that are relatively short, because radio usually only plays songs that are less than 4 or 5 minutes.
People's attentions spans are getting shorter and shorter. I don't want to cater to that necessarily but, just for myself, it feels like more than 40 minutes of music is too much.
There was this discussion to know how long the human ear was really receptive to the music. A 74 minute CD is too long. We thought about making two CDs, 35 minutes each... But the songs need to breathe.
Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.
The difficult thing about a pop record is that you're given guidelines: it has to have 3 choruses, and then it must be between 3 minutes fifteen seconds and three minutes forty-five seconds.
'Hound Dog' is a really short record, and most singles didn't last three minutes.
Making 13-minute tracks is pretty alternative, I think!
The more you push the budgets up, the more you make records cost $20, the more you make records last 4 and 5 minutes on the radio.
