The Tape Measure.

01Top 40 — Runtimes

The 40 songs they play most — counted down by runtime instead of by chart position, and nothing here charted below 183 plays. The bar is where the middle 80% of performances land; the dot is the median; the thin line is every version we have. A song with a tight bar is a known quantity. A song with a bar three minutes wide is a decision the band makes on the night, and those are the ones that eat a set.

Picked by how often they turn up rather than by how long they run. Ranking a length chart by length sounds right and is not: it fills the board with the longest things in the book, which over thirty-odd years means the rarities. All 303 songs with enough plays to average are in the table below.

02The long ones close the sets

Set-closers run 11.5 min against 9.1 mid-set, which looks like a strong positional effect and is mostly not one. Hold the song fixed and nearly all of it goes away: across the 147 songs played both ways, closing the set is worth -0.3 min — it makes a song slightly shorter, not longer — with 54 of 147 going longer, sign test p = 0.002. The 2.4-minute gap was song identity all along: the closers are the jam vehicles.

A twenty-second effect is not a lever anyone can pull, and that makes the model simpler: length belongs to the song, not the slot. What a set needs is a runtime budget, and a 78-minute set is 4 Timmy Tuckers or 16 Nebraskas — which is exactly what a flat song pool cannot tell apart.

03Every song we have a length for

The table view: same numbers, no color needed.

04Sandwiches: 536 nights where a song was played twice

moe. open a song, wander off through two or three others, and come back to finish it: Moth > Water > Yellow Tigers > Moth. Neither half is a performance of the song, any more than the first half of a sentence is a short sentence; the short halves were dragging every jam vehicle’s median down. We keep the longer part as the song’s length for that night and set the rest aside; the summed total is recorded too, because “how much of the night did this song eat” is the question a runtime budget will actually want.

Sorted with the most lopsided first: the ones where the band left the song hanging longest before coming back for it.