Year: 2002
Country: USA
Running time: 49 mins. 33 secs.
Spotify link
YouTube link (live version with mono audio)
Mei, by the Pennsylvanian symphonic prog group Echolyn is the longest track in the top 20. It runs nearly 50 minutes uninterrupted. You actually need to make a calendar reservation for yourself to be able to listen to the entire track, beginning to end, in one sitting.
This would most likely have made certain prog artists from the 1970's envious. Think about the effort that Jethro Tull had to go through to make A Passion Play (#17) at least appear to be a single, continuous song. In the vinyl era, Mei would have just fit into a single vinyl disc, using both sides, and cutting it mercilessly in half at some point around 25 minutes which might not even be a suitable place for a pause, for flipping the record over.
Usually, magnum opuses of this size are ambient compositions where the track is easily expanded by sustaining individual soundscapes for longer periods. It wasn't all that hard for Brian Eno to fill an entire CD with his 60-minute Thursday Afternoon since it didn't change all too much during that whole time. But this is not the case with Echolyn. Mei is a continuous song that evolves its entire running time, and contains no extended ambient passages.
Mei is the story of a man driving in his car and reflecting on his life, possibly because of a crisis of some kind that he has encountered. The group have described the track as "a combination of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Dante Alighieri's Inferno" as well as a love song "with love as something intangible and yet all encompassing, fragile, and yet eternal" ... "but a backdrop of darkness forever surrounds this love".
The opening of Mei is infinitely beautiful. First, vibraphone enters the soundscape played at a very, very low volume (not so low in the YouTube clip above) that is barely audible. Second, the strings join in with a sad melody that sounds slightly like quiet weeping. Next up is flute, then piano, and then finally the actual song begins. During its running time, it can mostly be classified as mellow rock, although there are some hard rocking passages as well.
One amusing thing is that Mei has even a chorus which we first hear twice between 5 and 8 minutes. Then it appears again... over half an hour later, at the 43-minute point! It is very likely a unique composition in this sense: there are some remnants of a regular song structure, but they have been twisted almost beyond recognition. Most of the individual sequences are played in succession but not repeated. And then, finally, in the very end the quiet vibraphone opening of the song is also used as its closing, bringing back memories from 49 minutes in the past.
Echolyn has made some other good albums as well, in particular As the World (1995) but none of them are so consistently masterful as Mei. Their most recent release is really very, very recent: their brand new, self-titled album Echolyn has just been released this June. Judging from the short samples I have heard so far, Echolyn has done some excellent work.
Echolyn is the group's first studio album release in seven years, since The End is Beautiful (2005). Its title is a little strange choice, considering that their debut album from 1991 was also called simply Echolyn. Some confusion between these two is to be expected.
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