Part 2

The book takes readers on a journey through time. How would you briefly summarise the impact of technology and the times on the EP format?

Funny enough, it survived every twist and turn of the industry from the 1950s to the present. I interviewed someone at the digital music company Pandora (shouts out to my friend Jason Roth who not only contributed some great reviews to the book, but also orchestrated that conversation) who indicated that at one point, EPs comprised nearly 20% of Pandora's online catalog. Which is extraordinary to consider, for a supposedly niche or dead form factor.

So if anything, the EP seems to have been not only quite resilient, but even a bit "shape shifting" through the years in terms of its staying power.

Outside of technological changes and stylistic developments, what were some of the most incisive moments in EP history from your point of view? 

To start, you have the very first EPs coming out in the early 1950s via RCA Victor -- their holiday catalog EPs and Elvis EPs are meant to offer a competitive alternative to the LP, sort of that generation's DVD vs. BluRay war.

I think you have EPs really starting to come into their own in the 1960s -- the Beatles had stopped touring and became a studio act and voila, "Magical Mystery Tour" (not the album that came out in America, but the 45-sized double-gatefold EP that was issued in the UK) really marks the EP as a unique vehicle for their music in the critical period between Sgt. Pepper and The White Album.

The Rolling Stones go to Chess studios in Chicago and record "5 X 5" there -- an EP that makes clear their debt to al the Black rhythm and blues artists they loved, such as Wilson Pickett and Chuck Berry, while also giving them a platform for their own songs written under the pseudonym "Nanker Phelge."



Is there a more perfect place for your songwriting debut than something as supposedly "flimsy" as an EP? Many of the best EPs of the 1980s -- think Mudhoney's "Superfuzz Bigmuff," Husker Du's "Metal Circus," My Bloody Valentine, New Order -- foretell everything to come in indie culture in the 1990s (grunge, Madchester, shoegaze, punk breaking through to the mainstream). It's as though those EPs are charting a map for the entire culture to follow a mere decade later.



Ice Cube's 1990 EP "Kill at Will" shows hip-hop starting to take center stage in pop culture, whereas previously it had been more of a curiosity born of rap battles in the parks of New York City.



And of course, there are some pivotal EDM and beat-centric EPs in the book that similarly open the doors for a more commercial application of that music later down the line, where established artists like Madonna took their love of dance music and culture and injected it into the mainstream.

Because the book is organized in "decades," you can truly see how the music created in any given decade reflects the societal, geopolitical and economic trends of the environment in which it's created -- and that these EPs can be fairly prescient in creating more opportunity for marginalized or under-represented communities as time goes on.

The book wasn't created with this theme in mind but it certainly emerged as the "votes" were cast for the greatest 200 EPs ever. 

My personal feeling is that during the LP age, a single vinyl side was often similar to an EP in many respects. Neil Young's Hawks & Doves, for example, can be thought of as two EPs forming one album, Exile on Main Street may even be a single work made up of four EPs. How do you see that connection yourself and are there other, even more recent examples?

I don't disagree with that take at all. The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour is one example of music the band clearly thought of as an EP that eventually was stretched out into an LP (at least in America) for almost purely commercial considerations.



Led Zeppelin's 1975 release Physical Graffiti might very well have been better off as a series of EPs -- and although it's not on the list, Ryan Adams' Love is Hell is basically two EPs that were marketed as such when they first appeared in 2004 before being stitched together as something of a double-album release. (That is a man who desperately needed an editor and the EP seemed to be a much better and sturdier platform for his music, in my opinion).



Can you imagine if the Clash's Sandinista! had been released as a series of EPs, or simultaneously released as such, rather than a triple album? I might have enjoyed it a lot more (it took me years to get to the bottom of that album and I was certainly a big fan, as the inclusion of "The Cost of Living" EP in this book suggests).

Stevie Wonder and the Jam included unique EPs that were part of Songs in the Key of Life and Side Affects, respectively. Any number of amazing double albums -- from Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation to Prince's 1999 or Sign o' the Times -- could easily have been reformatted into an EP series, although their record companies would likely have seen this as commercial suicide.



I also mention in the book's intro that there was a trend in the 2000s of artists releasing "companion" EPs to follow their LP releases, including songs that were remixed or simply left off of their bigger albums -- Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and Coldplay all issued so-called "stocking stuffers" in this way, creating another artistic (and critically: commercial) bite of the apple for the albums that were adjacent to these releases.

I can't help but think that Taylor Swift and Beyonce are both artists who are doing this more recently, and successfully -- Taylor's The More Red Chapter (a companion EP for 2021's "Red"/Taylor's Version) has racked up an incredible number of streams for an EP that's less than three years old. Maybe that's what the EP needs -- championship from someone like Taylor!



I am curious about your view of the CD EPs of the 90s which were very important for me personally. If we take doom metal band Reverend Bizarre, whose EPs would sometimes be longer than their albums, or The Orbs super long "Blue Room EP" - is this just a clever play with the rules of the format or do you think that the idea of still making an EP actually guided the music and led to different creative results?

It's great that you brought this up -- I actually reference this in the book's first chapter, to chart the evolution of the EP through the various form factors that emerged over the years.

You are right to call this out -- the CD and its accompanying technology definitely allowed bands to play with formatting and length in ways that weren't previously possible with vinyl just because of the limits associated with the mechanical process of pressing records.

Specifically I mention that there are EPs such as Mars Volta's 2005 release "Frances the Mute," which is a six-track work cut down to five on CD but that also includes a 32-minute closing track haphazardly split into 8 CD tracks so that the band would be paid an LP's wages vs. an EP's if it had remained five tracks.



Marilyn Manson's (not at all a favorite band, but an example) debut EP is nearly an hour in length; Autechre's 1999 release "EP7" is eleven tracks that clock more than an hour in length. Compare these to things like Weezer's so-called Green Album (which the band and its label considered an LP) which were less than half an hour's run time, or Circle Jerks' classic 1980 LP "Group Sex" which is 14 songs in 15 minutes.



If anything I think An Ideal For Living shows how arbitrary the music industry can be and how commercial concerns are often at the forefront of most "artistic" decisions, often to the chagrin of the artist or act involved.

The EP seemed poised to become the new format in the digital domain. Why did that not pan out quite as much as some expected (or bands like The Smashing Pumpkins once promised), do you feel?

Excellent point -- probably because it was neither fish nor fowl, and remains so today. So it really occupied its own lane or purpose vs. that of an LP or single -- in the book's first chapter I reference the fact that there are only two known or documented "platinum" EPs (both recorded by Elvis Presley in the 1950s) and that the Billboard charts (among others in the industry) that were specifically devoted to EP sales as a unique category had basically died out by 1970 or so.

I know that in the digital era, Billy Corgan and others had essentially declared the album "dead" and were trying other release strategies (if memory serves, the Pumpkins' "Teargarden by Kaleidyscope" project was conceived as a 44-track work that would be released as singles or EPs over time but basically petered out nine years later ten songs short of its goal).

I think Prince had similar ideas with his website subscription plan -- but the industry remains pretty hooked on the LP and single even at a time when MTV has stopped featuring music and radio has cleaved itself into almost purely corporate and non-profit/community supported camps.



The EP has never really been a commercial "hit" vs. an alternative strategy for releasing music that has somehow managed to survive 70-plus years of technology and business model changes.

Imagine that streaming giants decide to assign all EP tracks to an artist’s album from the same time and all EPs as such are erased overnight. What would be lost?

Well, where to start? (ha) I think what might be lost most of all is the artist's intent -- the EP has served its purpose quite well as a conveyor of a certain kind of music within an artist's catalog, over the years -- often songs that wouldn't neatly fit on an album, had a completely different mood or design or sound to them.

The fact that a band as savvy as Spoon has released 11 LPs, 8 EPs and 35 singles since forming three decades ago tells me that there was a deliberate design to what they were doing, they didn't WANT those songs to be jammed onto LPs as "bonus tracks" or seen as "maxi-singles" or b-sides or whatever.

In an era when everything's for sale in almost every way/manner possible, I have come to cherish an artist's actual intent -- and I think the EP, historically, preserves this quite beautifully.