Rebuild your musical attention span with brevity-defying epics from Frank Ocean, Bob Dylan and more.
No one wants their time wasted, including by music. But the rise of TikTok-optimized tracks less than two minutes long might be going too far. The best long songs are an antidote to that -- a way of resetting your auditory attention span and breaking free of the instant gratification pushed by streaming services. (The average song intro length decreased from 20 seconds in the 1980s to five seconds in the 2010s.)
Getting a list of the best long songs together requires just one or two arbitrary rules. Firstly, what's the minimum length to qualify? Eight minutes feels right, in that it's firmly clear of the five- or six-minute longish song (and that it allows for the inclusion of a certain track below). And what counts as a long song rather than just a long piece of music? We're going to have to disregard a lot of jazz and electronic music, because extended solos and long stretches of repetition, respectively, make the eight-minute mark unexceptional for them.
It's a similar case with songs that are long just because they have an extended instrumental section tacked onto them: "Free Bird", "Marquee Moon" and "I Am the Resurrection," we love you, but you're sitting this one out. A truly great long song is a song all the way through, whether that means it's constructed of different sections or simply the same section extended to a truly heroic length. So here are our 10 best long songs, ranked -- and don't you dare skip through them.
It has stiff competition for best track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy -- from "Lost in the World", namely -- but "Runaway" is inarguably the album's centerpiece, extending as it does to a truly proggy nine minutes. The simple, echoing piano riff draws us in slowly to the core of the song: the verses from Mr. West and Pusha T about acknowledging their douchebaggery, and the grimly funny chorus about toasting said douchebags. Then it's strings, that same riff looped over and over, and an extended vocoder section in which West's voice slips in and out of intelligibility.