Fading Into the Next Song

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

So, you have this song. It's pretty cool, but the fadeout is kind of long. What do you do? Continue the fadeout into the beginning of the next song on the album, and copy-paste the intro of the second song over the fadeout.

Live songs and medleys don't count. Concept Albums most definitely count. This refers only to when a song's fadeout spills into the beginning of the next one — sound effects, abrupt switches without gaps and other transitions don't count.

Albums that do this all the way through are known as "gapless albums".

Examples of Fading Into the Next Song include:
  • Eminem's album Recovery is entirely gapless, and it's not even a concept album.
  • Led Zeppelin: "Your Time Is Gonna Come" → "Black Mountain Side".
    • As well as "Friends" → "Celebration Day".
    • Also "The Song Remains the Same" → "The Rain Song".
  • Rolling Stones: "Ventilator Blues" → "I Just Want to See His Face".
    • In at least the latest CD edition of Bridges to Babylon, "Out of control" crossfades into "Saint of me". It's especially noteworthy because in the cassette and vinyl editions those two songs were separated by a side break.
  • The Roots' album Phrenology has this throughout the entire album, notably with the 20-second hardcore punk track "!!!!" → "Sacrifice" with Nelly Furtado and "Thought @ Work" → "The Seed (2.0)" with Cody Chestnutt.
  • Justice: On their first album, Cross, "Phantom" → "Phantom Pt. II". Happens a couple other times, as well.
  • Tool: "Parabol" → "Parabola". Well, as long as you consider them as separate songs and not just one long song split in two...
    • Also, "Disposition" → "Reflection" → "Triad", from the same album. They were apparently intended to be one long song as well.
  • Pretty much every song on Dream Theater's Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence does this, although it's a concept album, so it may not count.
    • Well, the second disc of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence is actually one song divided into eight tracks, so this is to be expected. In general Dream Theater does this a lot, even between albums. Six Degrees begins with the static from the end of Scenes from a Memory and Train of Thought begins with a fade in from the end of Six Degrees.
      • ...then Octavarium begins with a fade-in from Train of Thought and ends fading into itself
  • A few songs on Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight album. "Shadow of the Day" → "What I've Done", for example. "Leave Out All the Rest" seems to be an odd example, as it ends with the background noise of "Bleed it Out".
    • All the songs on Meteora, except for "Session" and "Numb".
    • Several songs in A Thousand Suns have this as their exact purpose, fitting that album's larger purpose.
  • A Perfect Circle do a similar thing with "Weak and Powerless" → "The Noose", as the fadeout in "Weak and Powerless" blends into the intro guitar rift for the next.
  • A staple technique of Pink Floyd with nearly every album having at least one example. It's particularly prominent on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, all of which have the majority of their transitions in this style. (Exceptions include most of the breaks that marked the ends of album sides in the vinyl era, but not all - CD editions of Dark Side have a small cross-fade from "The Great Gig in the Sky" to "Money" and The Wall has a cross-fade from the last song, "Outside The Wall," and the first, "In The Flesh?".)
    • There are only two distinct tracks on DSOTM: Side A and Side B.
    • Unusually for a Greatest Hits Album, Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd did this on every song, in an attempt to make it feel a bit less like a compilation.
  • The Beatles have "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" > "With a Little Help from My Friends". Then the "Sgt. Pepper" reprise → "A Day in the Life". "Back In the U.S.S.R." → "Dear Prudence" on The White Album.
    • A few songs on Abbey Road fit into this. The best example would be "You Never Give Me Your Money" into "Sun King". However none of the rest of the "Abbey Road medley" songs actually qualify, as they are all hard edits of songs recorded in a single pass.
  • Inverted by The Birthday Massacre several times on their album Violet, most notably with the ending of "Play Dead", which contains the opening of "Blue".
    • Their album Walking With Strangers does this with every song.
  • All of The Avalanches' album Since I Left You.
  • From Avenged Sevenfold's Self-Titled Album, "Unbound (Wild Ride)" ends with a Heartbeat Soundtrack that continues beating into the next track, "Brompton Cocktail".
    • Also, from City of Evil, "Beast and the Harlot" → "Burn It Down"
  • Hawkwind do this a lot.
  • This happens on almost every album by The Faint, but especially Blank-Wave Arcade and Fasciinatiion.
  • On Josh Groban's CD Awake, he sings "Lullaby" and "Weeping" with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the former fading into the latter.
  • Counting Crows: "Hangin' Around" segues into "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" on This Desert Life.
  • Twilightning: Delirium Veil → Return to Innocence
  • David Bowie's album Diamond Dogs three tracks segue one into the next and essentially (and intentionally) make one long song: "Sweet Thing" → "Candidate" → "Sweet Thing (Reprise)".
  • Green Day's American Idiot has "Holiday" mixed into "Boulevard of Broken Dreams".
    • It also has Are We The Waiting -> St. Jimmy (which they usually play as on in concert as well, unlike the other examples here), Give Me Novocaine -> She's A Rebel, and Extraordinary Girl -> Letterbomb. It is a concept album, after all.
    • Earlier than that on Insomniac was Brain Stew > Jaded, although they are often played together as one song.
    • Even earlier than this, the songs "Chump" and "Longview" on Dookie were mixed together in such a fashion. They are quite fond of this trope.
    • And now on 21st Century Breakdown we have the transition from "Last of the American Girls" to "Murder City" with the beeps which start at the end of the first and the drums which pick up when the track officially changes to the second.
  • "The Engine Driver" and "On the Bus Mall" by The Decemberists. They've probably got more given their love for concept albums, that example just jumps to mind.
    • Indeed. This trope features heavily throughout the band's concept album "The Hazards of Love," but it also appears with "The Crane Wife 3" to "The Island" and "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" to "Sons & Daughters"
  • Several Shania Twain albums run their songs together, although it's most obvious on Come On Over.
  • They Might Be Giants do this with "Au Contraire" and "Damn Good Times".
  • On Marvin Gaye's 1971 classic What's Going On, most of the songs segue into each other.
  • Arctic Monkeys: "This House Is a Circus" → "If You Were There, Beware"
  • Beck: "E-Pro" → "Que Onda Guero?".
  • U2 (on their first album, "Boy"): "An Cat Dubh" → "Into the Heart" → "Out of Control"
  • All of Janet Jackson's albums after "control."
  • Used a lot by Sufjan Stevens. On Enjoy Your Rabbit there are 14 tracks, and only two or three track transitions that aren't blended together. On Illinois, the second half of the album is mashed into two pieces: "Prairie Fire that Wanders About" → "The Great Godfrey Maze" → "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades" → "They Are Night Zombies!" → "Let's Hear that String Part Again" → "In this Temple" → "The Seer's Tower", then "The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders" → "Riffs and Variations on a Single Note" → "Out of Egypt".
  • Starflyer 59: "I Like Your Photographs" → "...Moves On"
  • The Flashbulb FORCES the ending to fade into the next song frequently on Kirlian Selections and on several of his other releases.
  • Patrick Wolf: "Vulture" → "Blackdown".
  • The album version of Weezer's "Pink Triangle" fades right into "Falling For You".
  • Almost every song on every album of Gregorian.
  • Audioslave: "Nothing Left to Say But Goodbye" → "Moth"
  • The album CHRONOS by All Heroes ends with the song "Eros" which loops back to the beginning of the first song on the album, "Aeon".
  • Tori Amos: "Josephine" → "Riot Poof" (on To Venus and Back's studio side, the live album being gapless) & "Give" → "Welcome to England" (on Abnormally Attracted to Sin).
  • On the Kiss album Destroyer, "Detroit Rock City" ends with a car crash that transitions into "King of the Night Time World". "King of the Night Time World" begins with the very ending of the car crash, so it's odd to listen to it individually.
  • Muse does this twice on Origin of Symmetry: "Hyper Music" → "Plug In Baby" (even though it's just the bass fading from one song to the next) and "Citizen Erased" → "Micro Cuts". Also, on their latest album, The Resistance, it happens again: "United States of Eurasia (+ Collateral Damage)" → "Guiding Light" (you can hear a missile coming from the left to the right channel during the "Collateral Damage" outro, and when it explodes, the following song kicks in).
  • Melissa Etheridge, "Shriner's Park" → "Change"
  • Anthrax: "Intro to Reality" → "Belly of the Beast"
  • The entirety of Christopher Tin's Calling All Dawns features this. Each song leads directly into the next (in fact, some songs abruptly start and cut off if you listen to them as standalones or out of order), and the album is meant to be listened to on loop.
  • Megadeth has "Dialectic Chaos" linking into "This Day We Fight!", from their 2009 album Endgame.
    • Their is also "Into the Lungs of Hell" on "So Far, So Good... So What?!" - the last note ends at the start of "Set The World Afire".
  • A fixture of Nine Inch Nails, and particularly prominent on The Downward Spiral and The Fragile.
  • The ENTIRE Australian version of Ministry of Sound's compilation album The Annual 2010.
    • Same with most of their compilations, as they're usually DJ mixes.
  • On Aerosmith's Get Your Wings album, the screaming and cheering from the end of "Train Kept A Rollin" slowly turn into the wind opening of "Seasons of Wither".
    • Rocks does this a number of times as well.
  • The Gorillaz album Demon Days has several songs that bleed into the next one, perhaps the most noticeable example being the mad laughing between the laughing of the children at the end of Dirty Harry becoming the mad cackle at the beginning of Feel Good Inc.
    • "Don't Get Lost in Heaven" and "Demon Days" do this quite well
    • Plastic Beach has Orchestral Intro → Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach, Superfast Jellyfish → Empire Ants, and Cloud of Unknowing → Pirate Jet.
    • Ridiculously common on Plastic Beach's immediate follow-up, The Fall. There are some songs that don't end this way, but they're few and far between.
  • The Protomen's first album, between Will of One and Vengeance.
    • They do it a few times on their second album as well with "Father of Death" > "The Hounds". Additionally, the entire second half of the album (starting with "How the World Fell Under Darkness") is this way.
  • Rammstein, "Links" → "Sonne"
  • Kanye West's "Spaceship" and "Jesus Walks", which follow each other sequentially on "The College Dropout," share a very similar bass line, giving the transition between the two this effect.
  • Oasis's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? has "Morning Glory" -> "Untitled Track #2" (an excerpt of B-side "The Swamp Song") -> "Champagne Supernova"
  • The Daft Punk album Discovery has only two or three obvious song-break points in the album.
  • Likewise, though the songs on My Bloody Valentine's magnum opus Loveless are largely distinct and self contained, there are few obvious song-break points on the album.
  • Asian Kung-Fu Generation's World World World has "Tabidatsu Kimi e" → "Neoteny" and "World World" → "Aru Machi no Gunjou".
  • Tiamat - almost every song in Wildhoney, which makes the album one big music piece. Also, a few in their last album Amanethes.
  • Portishead's "Magic Doors" → "Threads" on Third.
  • Darren Hayes' third solo album, This Delicate Thing We've Made, opens with this quite cleanly, from "A Fear of Falling Under" → "Who Would Have Thought?". So cleanly, in fact, that the first song ends abruptly without the second to follow it.
  • Most of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik is full of these, with the most noticeable being "Power of Equality" → "If You Have To Ask" → "Breaking The Girl".
  • Deftones: "Risk" → "976-Evil" → "This Place is Death" on their album Diamond Eyes.
  • On the Michael Jackson album Bad, the song "Speed Demon" fades into "Liberian Girl".
  • None of Enigma's albums have any silence at any point.
  • Nightmare: "??" ("Yukisou") → "Mahora".
  • Madonna did this with her album Confessions On A Dancefloor. She later released a non-stop version on itunes that ran for fifty-six minutes and thiry-two seconds.
  • Queen did this on several albums. Queen II and A Night At the Opera feature a longer, heavier song fading into a softer piano ballad ("The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke" → "Nevermore" on the former and "The Prophet's Song" → "Love Of My Life" on the latter). Sheer Heart Attack had "Tenement Funster" → "Flick Of the Wrist" → "Lily Of the Valley", all three of which were subsequently covered as a single song by Dream Theater.
  • Nightwish: Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan → Higher than Hope on Once; The Islander → Last of the Wilds on Dark Passion Play.
    • Another great example is "Slow Love Slow," which ends with the ticking of a clock, to "Scaretale" which begins with the thundering chime of said clock.
  • ALL of "And The Glass Handed Kites" by Mew. Well, it's sort of a concept album, and definitely Crowning Music of Awesome
  • Kamelot's "Solitaire" segues directly into "Rule the World" on Ghost Opera.
  • XTC's album Skylarking does this quite often. Even when one of the songs got replaced in later editions of the album, the effect was maintained in the same part of the album: "Mermaid Smiled" had it's last note bleed into "Dying", and when that song was taken off of the album to make room for the unexpected hit "Dear God", "Dear God" was re-edited to do the same thing.
    • Also happens in other albums, such as Black Sea (notably from "Towers of London" to "Paper and Iron"), and is very prominent in English Settlement (from "No Thugs in Our House" to "Yacht Dance").
  • Marilyn Manson's cover of "Sweet Dreams", which fades into "Everlasting Cocksucker" on Smells Like Children.
  • Panic! at the Disco loves to do this.
  • Enter Shikari does this on both their albums.
    • In Take To The Skies, it's most noticeable with Labyrinth → No Sssweat and Enter Shikari → Mothership, although most of the album fades rather smoothly.
    • Common Dreads has Solidarity → Step Up, Zzzonked → Havok A and Gap in the Fence → Havok B.
    • Also, the last track from Take To The Skies → Common Dreads' eponymous intro, if you were to play them in sequence.
  • In Foo Fighters' There Is Nothing Left to Lose, "Gimme Stitches" starts before "Learn to Fly" can end completely.
    • In Wasting Light, "White Limo" -> "Arlandria".
  • The Mars Volta do this throughout all of Octahedron.
  • On The Alan Parsons Project's album Eye in the Sky: "Sirius" -> "Eye in the Sky" (these two were performed in concert together as well)
  • Empire of the Sun's album "Walking on a Dream": "Half Mast" -> "We Are The People"
  • Iron Maiden's "Satellite 15... The Final Frontier" -> "El Dorado".
    • "Transylvania -> Strange World" on their self-titled album.
  • The David Crowder Band's latest album, Church Music, is absolutely full of this.
  • The early Moody Blues albums all do this. The only gaps are between the first and second sides.
  • Pendulum has a fair bit of this on the album "Immersion"; "Genesis" to "Salt In The Wounds", "The Island Part 1 (Dawn)" to "The Island Part 2 (Dusk)" (for obvious reasons)...they love it.
  • Overclocked Remix's album, Super Metroid: Relics of the Chozo, does this with every song on the album.
  • Most of BT's albums, except for the US edition of Movement in Still Life. On Ima, even the "Sasha's Voyage of Ima" medley does this at the end, crossfading into "Divinity". "Blue Skies (Delphinium Days Mix)", itself fading in from the main mix of the song, has a fake-out fade-in of "Embracing the Future" at the end. The Itunes version of These Hopeful Machines was initially released as two hour long tracks, "A Side" and "B Side".
  • Freaky Chakra's Blacklight Fantasy is a continuous mix except for the hard cut between tracks 5 and 6. The collaboration album Freaky Chakra vs. Single Cell Orchestra is also gapless. His other albums, although not totally gapless, mix certain groups of songs together, such as the epic medley "Peace Fixation -> Tra Vigne -> Hallucifuge" on Lowdown Motivator.
  • Blink-182 did this on "Enema of the State": "Adam's Song -> "All the Small Things"; "Aliens Exist" -> "Going Away to College" -> "What's My Age Again?"
  • Rogue Traders-Here Comes The Drums album does this once or twice.
  • The soundtrack album to Medal of Honor: Frontline crossfades several of the trackss: Border Town/U-4902, Kleveburg/Manor House Rally, Nijmegen Bridge/The Rowhouses, Emmerich Station/Thuringer Wald Express/Sturmgeist's Armored Train, and Approaching the Tarmac/Clipping Their Wings.
  • Jeff Beck's first solo album, Blow by Blow, does this multiple times, notably from "Air Blower" into "Scatterbrain", but happens all the way through for both sides of the record.
  • Cut Copy is rather fond of this trope - both In Ghost Colours and Zonoscope are nearly gapless.
  • Covenant's Modern Ruin album is gapless, excluding the silence before the Hidden Track.
  • "Kometenmelodie 1 & 2" from Kraftwerk's Autobahn. As the last note of part 1 is fading out, part 2 begins with an ear-piercing screech.
  • The soundtrack for Metal Gear Solid 4 does this with almost every song.
  • On the Matthew Good album Hospital Music, this occurs somewhat frequently, due to his propensity for using "guerilla recording", where he records random sounds (and conversations) outside the studio and includes them as "background" between some songs. Champions Of Nothing fades into A Single Spark Explosion this way, and Girl Trapped Under The Front Of A Firebird leads into I Am Not Safer Than A Bank by way of bizarre sound samples.
  • On Eels' Beautiful Freak, "Susan's House" fades into "Rags To Rags".
  • Jellyfish did so constantly on both Bellybutton and Spilt Milk. Bonus points go for abruptly segueing the heavy electric guitar feedback/distortion-ending of "All Is Forgiven" into the gently-strummed acoustic guitar intro to "Russian Hill" on Spilt Milk".
  • Juno Reactor's Beyond the Infinite is mostly crossfaded, and the last two tracks, "Rotorblade" and "Mars", have a seamless transition.
  • Mike Oldfield, creator of Tubular Bells and other very long instrumental pieces, carried his penchant for long compositions over to his poppier, more commercial records, particularly Platinum and Discovery. From Tubular Bells II on, instead of writing very long tracks, he splits his albums in several tracks that run together. In Tubular Bells 2003, a re-recording of the 1973 album, he split the album into 17 tracks, which compose two pieces of uninterrupted music, just like the original.
  • Evanescence utilized in Tourniquet-Imaginary (On Fallen), Like You-Lose Control, The Only One-Your Star (On The Open Door) and The Change-My Heart Is Broken (On Evanscence 2011).
  • The Crystal Method's "Drive" does this through three-quarters of the album.
  • KMFDM's Blitz does it with "Me and My Gun -> Take 'Em Out". Earlier, Nihil did it between "Brute" and "Trust".
  • Between Frequencies, the sole album of Cellsite System.
  • Vincent de Moor's Orion City is gapless for the first half.
  • Beethoven was a fan of this trope. Probably most famously used from the 3rd movement into the finale in his Fifth Symphony, but also used in the Emperor Concerto (from the 2nd movement to the finale), as well as in his Sixth Symphony, where he faded a scherzo into the Storm section, which then faded into the finale.
  • Orbital had "Lush" / "Impact" / "Remind" from the Brown Album, and "Way Out" / "Spare Parts Express" / "Know Where to Run" from The Middle of Nowhere. This would carry over to live shows, where they would treat the entire song suites as single, epic songs.
  • Skinny Puppy: "Incision -> Far Too Frail" and "Manwhole -> Ice Breaker" on Remission (CD reissue), "Tomorrow -> Dead Doll" on Bites(again only on the reissue), and most of Too Dark Park.
  • The entirety of Hybrid's I Choose Noise, and "Break My Soul -> Numb" on Disappear Here.
  • Ashlee Simpson: What I've Become-Hot Stuff off Bittersweet World.
  • Jojo on Coming For You into Let It Rain through mutual rain sounds, on her second album "The High Raod"
  • Most of the songs in Sound Horizon's Moira flow into the next. This is largely because the album is, according to Revo, one extremely long song that was broken up for the sake of clarity.
  • Clint Black's "A Good Run of Bad Luck" -> "State of Mind" from his 1993 album No Time to Kill.
  • Scuba is fond of this trope, using it extensively in his two albums A Mutual Antipathy and Triangulation.
  • The Sucker Punch soundtrack fades "Tomorrow Never Knows" into "Where Is My Mind?"
  • Unusually for a Greatest Hits Album, many of the songs on Let It Roll: The Best of George Harrison do this.
  • Mindless Self Indulgence's first album, Tight, fades from "Grab The Mic" -> "Bring The Pain."
  • Autechre generally does this at least once per album, such as Eutow-->C/Pach (Tri Repetae), Pro Radii-->Augmatic Disport (Untilted), and Fol3-->fwzE-->90101-5I-L-->bnc Castl (Quaristice).
  • Fayman & Fripp's A Temple in the Clouds segues "The Pillars of Hercules" to "The Sky Below".
  • The US edition of Blue Amazon's Javelin is gaplessly mixed, as is the first disc of the Limited Special Collectors' Ultimate Edition.
  • "Prodemium->Precious" and "Burned with Desire->Blue Fear 2003" on Armin van Buuren's 76; ditto for "Hymne->Sail" on his greatest hits/remix album Ten Years, and "Desiderium 207->Mirage" on Mirage.
  • Modest Mouse opens Good News For People Who Like Bad News with "The World at Large," which fades into "Float On." This highlights the fact that "The World at Large" is essentially a somber, slowed-down version of "Float On."
  • The Killers do this all the time. On Sam's Town, we have "Enterlude" to "When You Were Young" to "Bling."
  • Death Cab for Cutie does this on Narrow Stairs, where "You Can Do Better Than Me" fades into "Grapevine Fires," among others across their career.
  • Alter Bridge does this on "Blackbird": The first track, "Come To Life" --> "Brand New Start"
  • Most of OhGr's Undeveloped album, and to some extent Devils in My Details.
  • Front242, Front By Front: "First In, First Out->Blend The Strengths->Headhunter 3.0"
  • Electric Light Orchestra loved this trope. Eldorado is practically a gapless album except for the break between "Poor Boy" and "Mister Kingdom", a relic of its origins as a vinyl record. Both sides of Time on vinyl opened with three consecutive songs each fading into the next: "Prologue" → "Twilight" → "Yours Truly, 2095" on side A, and "Rain is Falling" → "From the End of the World" → "The Lights Go Down" on side B.
  • Stevie Wonder fades "Superstition" straight into "Big Brother" on his Talking Book album.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Fading_Into_the_Next_Song?oldid=1646233"