We break it down into nice forty-second chunks

[Film Music Geekery Here]

I was looking around an old haunt the other day, the FilmScoreMonthly message boards, to see what buzz might be going on regarding the soon-to-be-released Complete Recordings edition of Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (preorder yours here!), seeing as how very few film music releases of this quality are seen these days. Predictably enough, I found almost nothing said about the release at all, except for this thread, where I read a fairly jaw-dropping comment by James Southall:

If I want to listen to an album, I want to listen to all of it. Just look at the running time for TTT - over three hours! Who has that kind of time?! Do people who own and love the FOTR set ever listen to it in one go, or is it always in manageable chunks?

Does Southall find it a mystery how so many opera lovers find time to listen to complete recordings of La Traviata or Tannhauser, too? Geez. And the guy ought to know better than to ask so goofy a question, seeing as how he's the longtime proprietor of one of the oldest film music review sites on the Web.

Of course, a lot of the people who seem to have trouble wrapping their minds around the idea of a three-hour release of LOTR music are the same people who would stampede the White House lawn if it were announced that ten copies and ten copies only of a Jerry Goldsmith score were to be handed out at that locale on some December morning.

OK, geeky rant finished. Let's continue!