What is the longest song to ever be recorded?
With the average mainstream song hovering around the three-minute mark, you’re unlikely to find your favourite artist breaking the all-time time barrier for a piece of music. It’s not like Oasis, Taylor Swift or The Pogues will trouble the record books here. Or will they? If Guinness World Records are anything to go by, then the record for the world’s longest song belongs to a particularly niche candidate.
‘Shri Ramcharitmanas’ lasts a whopping 138 hours, 41 minutes and 20 seconds. The song is based on the Ramayana, an epic of Hindu poetry in the Awadhi language composed by the 16th-century Indian bhakti poet Tulsidas. The record-holder is its singer, Dr Jagdish Pillai, a scholar of ancient Indian religious texts from Varanasi, India, who set the poem’s words to a melody he originated himself.
‘Ramcharitmanas’ could also lay claim to the world’s longest-recorded song, a title it will have well and truly earned after being broadcast on more than 100 official audio channels over five years. But should we really consider the piece a song? And if its near-six days of recorded music have been spread out over a five-year period, does it actually count as the longest recording?
From symphonies to earworms
There are plenty of other contenders to the throne of longest recorded song. How about Earthena’s 48-hour piece ‘Symphony of the Crown’? Well, as it incorporates different types of classical music (while lacking much in the way of a crescendo) it’s difficult to define it as a song in the modern sense as well. Or the day-long ‘7 Skies H3 (Can’t Shut Off My Head)’ by The Flaming Lips, which takes us into pop/rock territory for the first time. Yet even this one was pieced together from several separate recordings of its different parts.
We could point to Pharrell Williams’ 2013 clap-along earworm of a song ‘Happy’. Its three minutes and 55 seconds were looped into a coherent, continuous 24-hour music video with various celebrities and laypeople alike lip-syncing the lyrics. Any records achieved by this audio-visual stunt don’t count towards the song recording itself, though.
So, let’s start by defining the longest song in the history of the world. Because there are some pieces out there which dwarf even ‘Shri Ramcharitmanas’ in terms of length.
What is the longest song in the world?
Since the second half of the 20th century, avant-garde musicians have been pushing their medium to all sorts of previously unheard-of extremes. Famed silence curator John Cage has done more than most in this regard.
In 1987 Cage adapted his piece ‘ASLAP (As Slow as Possible)’ for organ. Several years after his death, some Cage enthusiasts in Halberstadt, Germany, decided to apply the name of his piece to its notations as literally as they could. They aimed to play the slowest tempo version of any song in history, raising money to build a self-playing, mechanical organ specifically for the purpose.
The organ now sits in Halberstadt’s St Burchardi church, where it has been playing Cage’s piece since 2001. There are typically years during which only a single note of the composition is played, with the longest interval so far spanning most of the 2010s. The performance is scheduled to end in the year 2640, by which time, according to current climate projections, the Amazon will have become a desert, and Venice will be underwater.
John Cage might be responsible for the longest (and slowest) piece of classical music in history, but someone else has pushed the boundaries of song length even further. Believe it or not, Jem Finer, one of the founding members of the folk-punk band The Pogues, has taken on that mantle.
Song of the next millennium?
Finer’s composition is set up to continue without repetition for 1000 years. It started at the turn of the millennium, recording itself via a set of computers that Finer programmed to play a large collection of Tibetan singing bowls and gongs in virtually infinite combinations of style and order.
The piece is called ‘Longplayer’, which, as the longest-playing song names go, seems to be about money. Its recording plays on any digital music player currently in existence. So, you may be thinking, this is it, then. The longest-recorded song in history.
Well, can we really call Finer’s piece a song? It’s a piece of atonal electronic music without any discernible pattern whatsoever. And it’s not “recorded” in the past tense – it still has over nine centuries of recording to go.
Maybe we need to look at Chris Butler’s successful world record attempt for the longest pop song, certified by the Guinness Book of Records in 1997. ‘The Devil Glitch’ lasts an hour and nine minutes.
But even this piece is more of a gimmick than a song in the popular music sense. For the proper longest song ever recorded, let’s turn to the original arbiter of pop music: the radio.
Are songs getting shorter?
For a long time, it seemed as though three minutes was the perfect length for a track. There was one main reason for this: the radio. The DJs who appeared to be in charge of what did and didn’t get played liked the length of the song, because it both kept the attention of the listener and also gave them a chance for a smoke break. But, as time passes by, songs are getting shorter.
Now, it could be that our attention spans are getting shorter, which they most certainly are, but the real reason is the streaming era. Over the last decades of streaming dominance, the average length of songs has fallen, but with the advent of TikTok it fell like a stone. The average length is now just three minutes and 12 seconds.
“When TikTok came along, it changed a lot of things,” songwriter Ines Dunn told BBC. “People’s attention span dropped quite dramatically. You tune in for 20 seconds of a song, you don’t know the name of the artist, you don’t know anything, really. You just love that bit of music.”
Some musicians have had entire careers thrown into existence following a single trend on TikTok gathering pace, just ask Lola Young.
What’s the longest song ever played on the radio?
The longest song ever played on either American or British radio is generally considered Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic symphony ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’. The song’s minimal lyrics allude to the Garden of Eden bookend over 15 minutes of hard jamming soaked in acid. Its total length of 17 minutes also means it tops the list of longest jukebox songs included in the TouchTunes catalogue.
This take on the world’s longest-recorded radio hit doesn’t seem right, however, as it excludes most of the world. Around the same time that Iron Butterfly was shredding the airwaves, across the Middle East, an Egyptian singer was sending millions of listeners into a trance. Live recordings of Umm Kulthum’s performances would be aired monthly from Egypt throughout the 1960s.
While concerts could run for several hours, individual songs could last an hour. Recordings of ‘Enta Omry’ and ‘Alf Leila w Leila’ – the top two Umm Kulthum songs on Spotify – last 58 and 41 minutes, respectively.
What is the longest rock song?
If we’re sticking purely to “rock” music, though, you could take your pick for recordings running longer than ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’. How about the longest Grateful Dead song, ‘Playing in the Band’, a 46-minute recording of which makes it onto their eponymous live album?
Well, prog-rock band The Whirlwind have something to say about that. Their one-hour 17-minute epic ‘The Whirlwind’ surely stands among the longest rock songs ever recorded. But does it count among the longest “classic” rock songs? Aside from a handful of metalheads, no one sees this as a piece of any particular value, aside from its extraordinary length.
Maybe we should look instead to rock songs which made an impact on the mainstream in their own right. Take one of Madchester’s defining records, for example. ‘Fools Gold’ by Stone Roses broke into the UK top ten singles chart in 1989 despite (or perhaps because of) its nine minutes and 53 seconds of running time.
The song’s length might have been a barrier to it climbing any higher up the chart. On the other hand, that didn’t stop certain other drawn-out classics from making it all the way to number one.
What’s the longest number one song ever?
Let’s consider ‘Hey Jude’ by The Beatles, for starters. Although it wasn’t the longest Beatles song of all, the piece stands out as by far the group’s longest single at seven minutes and 15 seconds. It topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in many other countries.
Then again, ‘American Pie’, Don McClean’s lament about ‘The Day the Music Died‘, is a minute and a half longer than ‘Hey Jude’. McClean’s song reached number one across North America in the early 1970s.
But just over two years ago, another song claimed the record ‘American Pie’ had held up to that point for the longest US Billboard Hot 100 number one single. Taylor Swift’s rerecording of her 2012 hit ‘All Too Well’ as ‘Taylor’s Version’ of the song mercilessly stretched its four chords beyond the ten-minute mark. It proved more popular than the original version, reaching the top of the American charts.
Do we have to count this one, though, or can we get off on a technicality? After all, it’s the same song recorded by the same artist just made arbitrarily twice as long ten years later. What’s the difference between ‘Taylor’s Version’ and the original, anyway? Perhaps the publications that named ‘Taylor’s Version’ song of the year for 2021 while leaving the original off their 2012 lists entirely can answer that one.
Leaving aside Taylor Swift’s business tricks, the longest song to reach number one in the UK Singles Chart comes from another of Manchester’s finest. ‘All Around the World’ by Oasis lasts nine minutes and 38 seconds, bringing our definitive run through the longest successful song recordings to an end.
Which Oasis band members perform on ‘All Around the World’?
Oasis recorded the version of ‘All Around the World’ used as a single for their third studio album, Be Here Now, in 1997. This stupendously overblown bells-and-whistles version, complete with orchestral strings, quadruple-tracked Noel Gallagher guitars and “la la la” lyrics, belies the fact that it was one of the first songs Gallagher ever wrote.
The song would also be the band’s last number one single featuring the classic line-up of their prime years. Aside from Liam Gallagher on vocals and Noel on guitars, Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs plays rhythm guitar, Paul ‘Guigsy’ McGuigan plays bass, and Alan White is on drums.
