The first listen is a reconnaissance mission. You’re orienting, mapping the territory, deciding whether it deserves more of your time. A lot of things get dismissed here that shouldn’t be — things that needed you to be less guarded, things that required you to stop trying to evaluate them and just let them run. The first listen is often the least useful data point you’ll have about whether something is good and almost nobody accounts for this.
The second listen is where it starts. You’re not orienting anymore. You know where you are. The songs that confused you the first time now have room to do something. You start hearing things underneath the things — the bass line that was there the whole time, the lyric that sounds like one word but is another, the moment in the third track where everything shifts and you think oh, this is what it’s doing. The album reveals itself at the pace it chooses, not the pace you demand of it.
By the third listen you’re in trouble. You have opinions now. You have a favorite track and a least favorite and a moment somewhere in the middle that you’ve been waiting for since it started. You’ve started anticipating things, which means the album has installed itself, which means it has a permanent address somewhere in you and will be there when you’re doing dishes at forty-seven and a song comes on shuffle and you’re suddenly right back in whatever you were doing the week you discovered it.
The ones that hit immediately are often the ones you forget soonest. They gave you everything in the first listen and then had nothing left to show you. The ones that make you work — that seem flat or strange or too long or too quiet — sometimes turn out to be the ones that stay. The difficulty was the point. The thing that kept you at arm’s length was the same thing that eventually let you all the way in.
I almost gave up on an album last year after two songs. Something made me go back. I’ve listened to it probably sixty times since. I can’t explain what changed between the first twelve minutes and the next sixty listens except that I stopped trying to meet it halfway and let it do what it was doing without my input. It didn’t need my approval. It was just waiting for me to stop auditioning it and start listening.