The Art Of The Segue

“Wow!” I said. “This makes segueing so much easier!”

My confused hosts shot a quick glance at each other before chiming as one, “What’s segueing?”

A lot had changed in forty years. Apparently more than I thought.

Everything was different—even the location. No longer was it housed in a dilapidated carcass of an old hall with its aging hardwood floors that echoed when you walked on them. Today, the station finds its home in a sleek modern office building with a streamlined glass interior and ubiquitous industrial carpet.

That wasn’t the only change. The turntables were gone, too, replaced by an arcade-like array of blinking LEDs and game-sized video display screens. They waved me to the chair. “Play!”

But there were no records. The songs, once lining the walls of the old studio on run-down library shelves, now lived within the bowels of the server. Pristine bits and bytes had replaced the overly used scratchy vinyl albums. Oh, had I had this back in the day.

Would you believe I was an AM disc jockey (when AM radio used to play music)?

It was reunion time in New Haven, and my old radio station invited us old DJs in to spin a set in their new digs. Except they don’t “spin” discs anymore. They type in the songs. The computer plays them. It’s like how you would set up a playlist on Spotify. It’s efficient, but for an old DJ it has all of the excitement of a NASCAR racer “driving” a self-driving car. Where’s the art, the human touch, the thrill of a slip?

Today’s DJs just set it and forget it. They let the songs finish before playing the next one. This isn’t as sterile as it sounds. This style blossomed on FM stations in the 1970s. With its purer sound, audiophiles preferred that versus the more popular Top 40 AM stations. And audiophiles didn’t want their listening experience marred. They wanted to hear the song from start to finish without interruption.

There’s a reason FM stations back then promised “deep album cuts.” For one thing, that tagline differentiated them from their AM rivals. But they also delivered on that promise. FM disc jockeys played from albums, not singles. And when you listened to an album, there’d be this space of silence between songs (with the notable exception of the Beatles’ Abbey Road medley).

On FM stations, you’d often hear this space of silence between songs. They called it “refined.” Sort of like the NPR of rock and roll.

On AM stations, they’d call it dead air. Dead air was the most feared faux pas an AM disc jockey could make. Trainers taught you how to avoid it. The easiest method was to talk over the songs to bridge the gap between them. You couldn’t talk over lyrics, but you could talk over instrumentals. The great DJs timed their voice-over to end just as the vocals kicked in.

Now, that was an art. But it wasn’t the only art.

A more challenging method of avoiding dead air was to segue the songs, so the beginning of one song would play over the ending of another. For those NPR folks who might snoot at this banal act, the word “segue” (pronounced like “Segway”) comes from the Italian seguire, meaning “to follow.” As you know, Italian is the language of music. “Segue” is actually a musical term meaning “to proceed without pause from one musical number or theme to another” (per Merriam Webster).

Visiting the old (but new) radio station that day, I learned the young DJs chaperoning me only knew how to play songs sequentially. They couldn’t play one song over another—the very definition of seguing. They had no idea what it meant. I promised to show them in my set. To do this, I had to jerry-rig a phone into their computer system so I could have two output devices. This allowed me to play two songs at once. I played my set. As one song merged into another, I could see on their faces how much they liked this sound. It was as if they entered a new world of musical artistry.

Interestingly, the younger crowd is enthusiastic about the return to vinyl. Ironically, those older don’t value the return to vinyl, preferring the ease and reliability of the digital. They remember vinyl records wearing down to unlistenable scratches. Worse, you may recall your records literally melting in the sun when leaving them inadvertently in the back seat of your car.

Keep in mind that you can still segue songs in digital form. In fact, it’s easier and won’t ruin the record. With vinyl, queuing up a record for a good segue requires playing it backward so that it starts exactly where you want it to. Whether it’s an album cut or a single, this scratches (and ruins) the record. In the electric world, it’s much easier to find the “sweet spot” for each segue.

One last echo, and one which might echo with you, was a recent conversation with an old college roommate inspired this column. We were talking about music. My mind drifted back to my radio days. Somehow, we got into a rather heated discussion of “has-beens.” He said I was lucky. My favorite band (The Beatles) broke up at their peak, while his favorites (The Who and Led Zeppelin) have continued well past their zenith. He suffered as he watched their glory first grow stale, then fade away.

He saw them segue from one point in their careers to the inevitable end. Contrast that to The Beatles. As a group, they simply stopped. There was no segue. There was simply an end.

Doesn’t this kind of remind you of the way DJs play songs now?

It also hints at the way my DJ career ended.

I dropped the needle for one last spin. And never looked back.

Well, at least for forty years.