Great album openers get the listeners to keep on listening. They can do this in any number of ways. Some openers set the tone by easing us in. Others jump right in and blow our minds from the very beginning. A great album opener isn’t an easy thing to create. More than a great song, it’s all about the sequence. Track 1 has to be the perfect starter. This month, I’m highlighting my favorites. #AlbumOpeningSongs
Lauryn Hill wasn’t the first to rewrite the rules of concept albums. But The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was a huge step forward. It showed that a record could be just as effective of a vehicle for a story than a book or movie. The music on the album was phenomenal, but the storytelling was even more powerful. Miseducation was an album that could imagine in your head. Every time I listen to it, I can picture the classroom and the street corner with vivid detail. And Lauryn Hill made a powerful statement at the beginning, opting for an audio story approach rather than the traditional song format.
“Intro” is only 47 seconds long. It’s perhaps the least played track on the album. It contains no singing, no rapping, no melody. But it’s the track that sets the stage and holds the entire album together. “Intro” puts us inside a classroom at roll call. We hear the teacher calling out the students’ names one by one. One by one, they respond. But the child version of Lauryn Hill is missing. The teacher calls one, twice, three times. but no answer. This simple track makes the album title that much more poignant and lets us know from the outset it’s not just a catchy name. This entire album is one autobiographic story.