Seven Minutes in Earwyrms Heaven
ISSUE #305
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.
There’s divinity to the number everywhere, of course. It represents the spirit in numerology. It’s the only prime number preceding a cube. It’s called “lucky,” “happy,” and “safe” by mathematicians. It’s the medieval number of liberal arts: in logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. In that, it's the number of notes in a scale. It’s the length of a 7” single. Vinyl records had physical limits—a band could fit two or three songs on Side A, or they could give us a 7-minute bad boy like "Blue Monday.”
To my mind, the latter's the better choice—give me just enough time to melt away. 7-minute songs can have multiple acts: the piano exit of “Layla," "Luke's Wall" in “War Pigs,” the many different battles in “A More Perfect Union." It's enough time to wonder, but not enough to worry.
On Sunday, Earwyrms celebrated its 7th anniversary, so here are my favorite 7-minute songs. I’ve long since abandoned my promise to not make these playlists too long. Let's just enjoy these unexpected fruits of time. Every minute of a song is a heavenly gift. Every year of life, a sudden miracle.
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.