Of Song Lengths

I'm ashamed to admit that the length of a song is something that ultimately affects what music I listen to. I know it shouldn't, but "I'm only human," and it does. I believe the root is found in my old Dream Theater fanboy self. I learned of all these elements of "progressive" music from Dream Theater members talking about their own group. They'd either make reference to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, which isn't even a song, or they would claim that the average Dream Theater song is about 10 minutes long, which isn't the case. Its 7:33; yes, I did calculate it, and yes, I'm ashamed to admit it. This perception is one I'm trying to lose, but one that doesn't want to be lost. I owned Close To The Edge for months before listening to it. I somehow got the idea what a title track of 18 minutes is too good for my ears, so I put off listening to the album at all, which turned out to be a mistake. I initially looked up on The Decemberists because they wrote some long songs, like The Crane Wife and The Island. I looked down up bubblegum-era Beatles because their songs were always 2 minutes and something long. I didn't bother listening to Frank Sinatra because he just sang 3-minute pop songs, which, being 3 minutes long, were inferior to 10-minute prog epics. And somehow Death Cab For Cutie didn't contribute anything to music because they wrote shorter songs. Only when I got past that fact did I learn that quality and song length aren't remarkably correlated.

The only time I listen to music without knowing the length of the song is while watching concert DVDs, which is what brought me here. I watched Joe Satriani's Live In San Francisco DVD and one of the highlights was a bass solo from Stu Hamm that I remember as being well-developed and fun. What I didn't learn until skimming YouTube today was that it is more than 6 minutes long. It didn't seem that long while watching it without knowing the length. My interest didn't waiver and I didn't ever think "wow, this guy has been playing forever" or "this part is too repetitive." When I came across it on YouTube, I realized that if I hadn't already seen it, I would have noticed the 6:04 timestamp and skipped it. Unaware that it had multiple parts to it and was actually decent, I let something from my past self prevent me from enjoying music that interests me.