If there’s any band that ought to know about the importance of structuring an album in a way that makes the listener want to hear it in its entirety over and over again, then Pink Floyd must have been the masters of it.
Famed for their high-concept records that took psychedelic rock down progressive avenues, albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here were designed to be experienced in full, with no excuses for skipping ahead to your favourite moments. It’s the way the songs are all stitched together that make these records special, not just the individual songs themselves, and a close attention to detail when crafting these albums was something that the band couldn’t afford to ignore.
While a lot of this was down to the band’s two leaders, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and to a certain degree, Syd Barrett before he departed the band, Richard Wright and Nick Mason would undoubtedly have recognised the importance of sequencing a record in this fashion, Despite not having quite as much input on a compositional level, they were still integral to coming up with interludes that helped piece the final product together.
Wright himself was also a massive fan of other acts who paid close attention to this detail on their own records, and many of his favourite contemporaries were also known for having produced records that had the same level of replayability as the ones he was creating. During a 1996 interview with Record Collector, he expressed an admiration for several records that took this same meticulous approach, such as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and Talk Talk’s The Colour of Spring, but there was one in particular that he’s never been able to get enough of.
Speaking about Steely Dan’s 1976 album The Royal Scam, he noted that the album has an undeniable staying power, which has helped it become completely ingrained in his memory. While not necessarily as highly regarded as other albums of theirs, such as Aja or Pretzel Logic, their fifth album is still part of the band’s incredible run of seven records that they released in their initial stint as a band, and sees them perfect the art of crafting an album that is designed to be consumed as a whole.
“There’s something about the title track that insists I listen to it immediately,” Wright argued. “I might not have heard it for six or seven years, but it’s been implanted in my brain and that’s what I think makes favourite records, things that you can’t get out of your head. I really admired Steely Dan and I almost picked Aja for this list, but I finally went for The Royal Scam because of that one track.”
While Wright questioned whether the duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker reuniting was a good idea, and whether they’d be able to recapture the magic that they once possessed, it’s clear that albums like The Royal Scam are a perfect example of how Steely Dan were able to transcend genre boundaries. They made music that was clever while drawing from so many different influences, and the fact that the album runs so smoothly as a whole is ultimately what makes it so special.
