How long recording album

When I listen to Black Messiah , or any other album with a storied history of resisting unnatural deadlines, I may hear growth and confuse it with time.

And yet the entrancing power of that story, of that wait, remains. The gravity and magic that long-awaited albums hold have always been rooted in the unenchanting historical marketing interests of the record industry. But today, artists are challenging the idea that great albums should take any particular time at all.

One artist currently playing with expectations of release timing is Chattanooga, Tennessee rapper Bbymutha , who has, over the past year, racked up a steady stream of independently released albums, EPs, and one-off singles. On the other hand, independent musician Karin Dreijer has gained a reputation for releasing music unhurriedly across their year career. On an independent label, Dreijer says they have never felt pressure to put out music at any particular moment.

It takes time. Artists that sidestep those limitations keep the dream of impulse and spontaneity alive. Over the past several decades, expectations related to how often artists should release new music have changed, affecting how they develop from fad throwaways to cultural institutions.

Weisbard points to Frank Sinatra, with his trajectory from teen sensation to musical icon, as the archetype for all of the blockbuster pop stars that have followed. The Voice of Frank Sinatra , originally sold in a set of four, one-song-per-side 78 rpm records, lent him a new measure of authenticity. Becoming the go-to format for adult-oriented genres like classical and jazz, they took on an association with more cultural permanence and higher taste; 45 rpm singles, introduced by RCA in , featured shorter play times and lower retail prices, appealing to pop and rock acts with younger fanbases.

With their market-driven appeals to greater artistic permanence than here-now-gone-soon singles, LPs became a stabilizing force for record labels trying to remain profitable in the historically volatile industry. Twelve years after their introduction, LPs made up 80 percent of total record sales. As teen-oriented pop and rock acts started to mature artistically and amass more gravitas, their new status was reflected in relatively longer gaps between releases.

Thanks to a record deal intended to milk the Beach Boys for quick profit, the supposed fad band put out three studio albums per year on Capitol from to Despite lower sales than their previous albums, the highly orchestrated Pet Sounds distinguished Wilson and the group as musicians with a specific creative vision.

The Beatles followed a similar trajectory from an underestimated teen act to vanguards, releasing their first three studio albums over the course of a year and a half. When they hit the studio, they made their album in just 2 days — One for tracking and one for mixing. But before you consider doing this yourself, have a listen to what Sabbath sounded like live in That is the power of dedicated practice. You could just put some good mics up and call this an album. Generally, studios will book their rooms in 8, 10 and sometimes even 12 hour blocks.

The 12 hour ones are rarely worth it. Diminishing returns set in sooner than you might expect. Can this be done faster? Theoretically, sure. Common scenario. Learn from it. Once setup is completed, you can play through a full album in one or two takes, maybe going back for a couple fixes and redos. The third album, rumored to be called "25" she turned 26 in May and had a baby in , supposedly is coming soon, but even if it popped out tomorrow, more time will have elapsed between her first and third albums than between the releases of "Please Please Me" and "Abbey Road," the first and last albums the Beatles recorded.

One of the most exciting parts of being a music fan is riding the surge: that flurry of activity when artists are growing and creating their best work, album after album, year after year.

When you examine the track records of many of the rock era's greatest acts, it's hard not to conclude that these intense stretches of productivity were essential to their development — and it's logical to wonder whether the years now typically taken between albums is resulting in stunted artistic development and a shortfall of great music. Each of the 10 albums topping Rolling Stone's Greatest Albums of All Time list published in May arrived no more than one calendar year after the artist's previous album.

The four Beatles albums that made the top 10 — "Sgt. Now the technology to record albums is cheaper and more accessible than ever, and online distribution enables musicians to get their work to fans with fewer steps and people involved, so we should be experiencing another golden age of creative productivity, right? Heck, when Radiohead — perhaps the most critically lauded rock band of the past two decades — released its album "In Rainbows" in October as a pay-what-you-want download a mere 10 days after revealing its existence, a sense of revolution was in the air.

The shackles were off! Artists were in control! They could release music whenever they wanted to! Since then this innovative British band has released just one album, "The King of Limbs," in Then there's U2, which during the Super Bowl in February unveiled "Invisible," said to be the lead single from the Irish band's first album since 's "No Line on the Horizon.

U2 seems to be in a vicious cycle: Heaven forbid the album isn't perfect , because it'll take so long to come up with another one. Granted, these are veteran bands that have earned the right to slow down after being more prolific earlier, but what of younger artists looking to build some momentum?

MGMT won over rock and dance-pop fans with its bright debut, "Oracular Spectacular" online, physical CD , and the popular singles "Time to Pretend," "Electric Feel" and "Kids," but the duo's more overtly psychedelic follow-up, "Congratulations" , proved less popular though I liked it more.

Then they took three more years to come up with the murkier "MGMT" , which might've been viewed as an incremental step had it followed on the heels of "Congratulations" but instead felt like a muted chapter in a book taking too long to unfold. Says former Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin of this trend: "There's so much gestation between records, it's hard to trace the trajectory. That wasn't the case when R.