[hinkley]

Most good albums have one song that was never released as a single, that’s just for the fans. So even beyond the “story” the album contaminates, they miss important chapters.

Anyone who talks about Tears for Fears, a side conversation about The Working Hour will start. Throwing Copper had five or six singles released over almost three years, but Pillar of Davidson is still my favorite song from that album, and one of my favorites overall. I could listen to Kashmir or PoD in much the same mood. They just build and build.

It would be similar to Patreon content today (though writers with Patreon or magazine articles often release collections later that have all of the rarer content. Martha Wells is the first to spring to my mind, and Naomi Novik for another)

[tomcam]

For me that's very often the 7th song on an LP and usually starts its second side

[gibspaulding]

Wow, I remember noticing this same thing back when I was exploring a lot of different artists. On streaming sites often a bands top songs will be ones that came out recently, or a collab they did with a more popular band, or a track that for whatever reason appealed to a wider audience. But those aren’t what you really want to hear if you’re trying to decide if you like that band. My strategy would instead be to go find either the bands earliest studio album or the oldest album that is well represented in their top tracks and skip to track 7. I never thought about why, but it definitely works.