"Bookending" Closing Songs?

Free - Tons of Sobs. The track 'Over The Green Hills' starts and closes the album.

 

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

 

Maybe not quite what the OP is asking, but worth mentioning: albums that have EXACT the same song at the beginning AND the end. I can think of two:
-The Sallyangie (Mike & Sally Oldfield) - 'Children of the Sun' (track: ' Strangers');
-the 'Grease' soundtrack (title track by Frankie Valli).

 

And also Tonight’s the Night and Freedom (Rockin’ in the Free World).

 

Arcade Fire's Everything Now fades in on the title track and out on the reprise... it actually loops on the CD on repeat.

 

Savoy Brown:

Gypsy
Romanoff

Both tracks from their Looking In album

 

And, Behind The Lines and the melody from Turn It On Again are incorporated into Duke’s End.

 

Yes, themes from Dance On A Volcano and Squonk are incorporated.

On ...In That Quiet Earth from Wind and Wuthering, the opening melody from Eleventh Earl Of Mar is included.

 

Sgt, Pepper — in the sense that the opening title track and the penultimate title track reprise have the effect of pushing the closing "A Day in the Life" off the edge of the album and out into the unearthly cosmic coda space it occupies, psychedelically speaking.

 

And let’s not forget after the end of Everybody Has A Dream, from Billy’s Joel’s The Stranger album, there’s a reprise of the opening to the album’s title track.

 

Mansun's Attack of the Grey Lantern, Dark Mavis closes with the opening of the first track The Chad Who Loved Me.

 

It also contains an instrumental interlude somewhere in the middle. Love this album!

 

And also It’s Yourself on Los Endos.

 

Pink Floyd's The Endless River. There's some keyboard motif that opens the album in 'Things Left Unsaid' and closes it in 'Louder Than Words'.

 

Another great example comes from Laura Marling's album Once I Was An Eagle. The first five songs (a suite played live in the studio) are linked by a common motif, a simple ascending scale played on the guitar. The final track Saved These Words begins with a descending minor chord pattern, then, after an instrumental break, reintroduces the ascending scale in a major key. Very effective.

 

Good point...I forgot about that one.

 

Mikal cronin’s first album ends in a discordant cacophony but transitions into the first song on the album by way of some beach boyesque harmonies. Really caught me by surprise the first time.

 

Ian Hunter's "All Of The Good Ones Are Taken" is bookended by two different versions of the title track.

The weird spoken intro/outro parts that bookend The Tubes debut record.

 

Coldplay's Ghost Stories. Bookending a choir-like sampling.

 

Todd Rundgren, Initiation. Side one opens with Real Man and the same side closes with a reprise of the chorus. Since side one is 30 minutes long, and side 2 is all instrumental freak out, I consider side 2 to be a different project all together.

McCartney brings back themes on Pioes of Peace on side 2

This is one of my favorite techniques and characteristic of great albums. If I made albums, I would always do this kind of thing.

 

Along the same vein, Elton John's Empty Sky album closes with Gulliver/Hay Chewed which has a medley of the songs that were on the album.

 

And Selling England By The Pound closes with Aisle of Plenty, using the same melody and guitar part as Dancing with the Moonlit Knight, albeit with a melancholy "tint"

 

and Queen's Made in Heaven, which starts with a little piece from the hidden ambient track that closes it.

 

The Duke album also had an intended suite known as "Duke Suite." It started with the first three songs on side 1 ("Behind the Lines," "Duchess" and "Guide Vocal"), and then side 2 opens with "Turn It On Again" and concludes with "Duke's Travels" and "Duke's End," so not only did the entire album have all the related parts of the planned suite bookend the album as a whole, side 2 is by itself also bookended.

~Ben

 

Prince - emancipation »

The album starts and ends with the same backwards cymbal sound.