New book on music history promises to spark as many discussions as it can resolve

In the late 1940s, Columbia Records attempted to dominate the recorded music market by introducing the long-play album – those 12-inch wonders that could be filled with songs and played at 33.5 revolutions per minute. Fearful of losing its market share, rival label RCA responded with the extended play 45, known as the EP – a 7-inch single that contained at least two songs per side and was often packaged in pairs in gatefold sleeves.

While the momentum of the LP has remained fairly consistent to this day, the EP has undergone something of a shapeshift: from simply repackaging singles by popular artists to boost sales and get on the charts, it has become a way for artists like Pavement and The Pretenders to release a small amount of new material without the pressure of completing an entire album.

Or as Britt Daniel from Spoon puts it in his foreword to the recently published book An ideal of life: A tribute to the EP – Extended Play (Hozac Books, 202 pages, $25.99): “The EP is a musical sweet spot where you can be completely alone…knowing that what you’re making is just for you and those who love you enough to follow you anywhere.”

This new work was conceived and overseen by Corey duBrowa, a former Portland resident and longtime music journalist who, like his friend Daniel, has been obsessed with the format since buying a copy of the debut EP by new wave idols Oingo Boingo in 1980.

“The EP was kind of like musical Goldilocks,” says duBrowa from his home in Bend. “Not too hot, not too cold. It wasn’t a single, it wasn’t an LP. It was something in between. For me, the EP was that happy middle ground.”

An ideal for living (named after Joy Division’s 1978 debut EP) came about after duBrowa began researching the EP’s origins online and found the information available was inadequate. He decided to tell the story himself, and wrote a “thesis,” as he calls it, which became the book’s first chapter. As he told Hozac when presenting his initial findings, “You know rock critics love a good list, so I think I should put together a list of the best EPs of all time and bring a few friends in to the discussion.”

These friends included renowned journalists Annie Zaleski and WW Contributor Jason Cohen, Bratmobile drummer Molly Neuman and filmmaker Nickolas Rossi, among many others, all contributed to the book. With their help, duBrowa was able to consider dozens of EPs released from the ’50s to today, shaping the final chapter with the 25 best EPs of all time. The finished list is impressively extensive, and includes releases from Elvis Presley, the enigmatic dubstep producer Burial, Ice Cube and Pink Floyd.

As with all music books of this kind, An ideal for living will delight and frustrate readers and spark as many discussions as it will help settle. I give him points for explaining slatethe 1981 six-song release by post-punk geniuses The Fall, as an EP, despite the band members’ insistence that it was a “mini-album”, but I’m deducting the same amount for omitting the 1994 album. Archers of Loaf against the greatest of all timemy favorite piece of wax from North Carolina indie rockers Archers of Loaf.

More than that, duBrowa’s book showed me how resilient the concept of the EP has remained, even in the streaming age. “It has lived through every change in the music industry,” he says. “One of the EPs in the book, Earl Sweatshirt’s Consolation), is a single track on YouTube. That’s the only way it’s ever been released. For something that never took off commercially, it’s endured culturally.”