For years, my favorite song was 7 minutes long. I never chose to have “All My Friends” hit me how it did, but I can justify it: 7 minutes is the perfect length. Temporal mathematics have divine standards­ too—like the Fibonacci sequence in the natural world, in music, 7 holds liminal significance.

This issue is full of my favorite drum songs. We keep time without second thought. Time passes through us almost like radiation, suffusing every step of our lives. The drums let us tap into some existential clock.

This issue is dedicated to those Left Turn Albums, the follow ups to big hits that try out new sounds. They’re bloated. They’re weird. They’re often incoherent. Many stretch past twenty or thirty songs. They’re derided at first, then later admired.

Polyphony—the singing of two or more melodies at once, like the left and right hands of a piano player. The pleasure of hearing multiple melodies as they weave through one another is as voyeuristic as it is edifying, like overhearing the sublime grammar of a couple’s secret language.

Orphaned tracks are songs that never made it on a proper album, lost gems or throwaway cuts that never made it to a band’s long-form releases. These are your b-sides, rarities, demo sessions, soundtrack contributions, etc.