That laugh

[halley!steve@cs.utexas.edu (Steve Williams)]

In one of his rare articles, Edward Suranyi follows up someone else with:
>
>Not so fast!  The laugh is at the beginning of "The Fog" on the US
>compact disc, but from what I understand it's at the end of "Love And
>Anger" on the British CD!  (I'd like to hear what the situation is
>in other parts of the world.)

Two comments:

First, with the way things are set down on CD, a piece of sound that an
artist inserts *between* two discrete songs must be registered as part
of one or the other, or get a track listing all its own.  So it's
possible that the laugh isn't part of either song (or is part of both),
but somebody had to mark it as one or the other.  This sort of confusion
is also common with recordings that run one song into another on the
same note or refrain.

Second, what if -- just what if -- Kate had a hand in seeing that some
CD encodings would show the laugh belonging to one song, with others
linking it to the other song.  A very "Kate" kind of thing, don't you
think?  (I personally believe it was just left up to the respective
engineers, or appears as it does because of someone's screw-up, but I'd
*like* to believe Kate did it as a little joke.  It *is* a laugh, isn't
it?)

By the way, the best non-chain record store here in Austin shows TSW
as their #3 best-selling album for the past 4 weeks, which includes
one week before the album was even released.  I haven't heard a single
Kate song on the radio, but then, I never *listen* to the radio.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Williams               ...!cs.utexas.edu!halley!steve
Tandem Computers                (512)-244-8252
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------