I simply said that beginning the songwriting process with the idea that the song needs to be thirty minutes, is an idea that's seldom going to yield positive results.
Only if you have no internal editor. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with including "song length" as a parameter when starting the songwriting process. I'm sure almost all songwriters do it, most of them unconsciously, and most are targeting the 3-5 minute range, but the basic framework is still there in their minds. If you want to craft anything with a well-planned structure, you need to start with some idea of what your constraints are.
So if a band wants to try creating something that works within a 30-minute constraint, I'm all for that, because compared with a 4-minute constraint, you're much more likely to end up with a result that's new and unlike anything I've heard before. Certainly that result can be garbage too, but that's what the internal editor is for. If Moonsorrow just said "ok, we're going to write three 30-minute songs" and then crapped out the first 90 minutes of music that came to their heads and printed it to disc, then yeah, that's stupid. But if they give it the same level of quality control that they gave to their 8-minute songs, then I'll gladly accept the increased risk of failure for the potential payoff.
No one will ever convince me, that if they broke disc into 10 tracks, it would have received one tenth the amount of praise it received.[/I].
I don't know...I still feel like the album is relatively unknown and the group of people who love it is fairly small, which leads me to think that they honestly love it for its merits, and not because of any gimmick. Maybe when it first came out, there were a bunch of webzine writers who praised it up and down for its length without even really listening to it, but these days, I bet the true fans would feel exactly the same about it no matter how many tracks it had.
Neil
