“If you listen to it as one piece, it’s almost like one song anyway… it’s about taking the listener on a journey.”

Welcome back to Song 2, the podcast where we try, sometimes stubbornly, mostly enthusiastically, to convince you that the second track on an album is either the best or the most important. Sometimes we win the argument. Often we don’t.

This time, we put the theory to Harry from Maruja, in a slightly chaotic pre-Christmas chat recorded from a car park in Germany with questionable Wi-Fi and strong opinions on tracklisting.
(image: Sony Music)

Harry doesn’t fully buy into the “second song supremacy” idea but what he does offer is something arguably more interesting: a defence of albums as cohesive journeys in a streaming world that increasingly fragments them.