When I was a kid – I define that period from the age 4 to 16 – I had a precise way to listen to albums. I would always start listening from the beginning of side A – we are talking about the age of compact cassette – and go through the end of side B, following the exact given order. I would never break this routine, as I believed that there was a reason why the artists put the songs in that sequence: if you’d start listening from A3, you might miss the beginning, like skipping the first 50 pages of a novel.
It wasn’t that easy to consider an album as a novel, composed of songs that are entirely consistent when listened from A1 to B6, especially with pop
albums, where A1 was a song about falling in love followed by B2 about the breaking up.
I
would
reckon
that
love
must
be
far
more
complicated
than
I
imagined,
as
the
feelings
were
changing
within
the
brief
silence
separating
the
songs.
You can read the entire text in Aslı Çavuşoğlu / Mercury in Retrograde printed by art-ist, 2012.