i don't love heart like jake does but it's a solid opener. the only other i could see opening is higher devotion, which is placed oddly in the album as is
I don’t like Movielike as an opener (it would be a great track 2 though). Higher Devotion into My Best Theory would be REALLY cool, but Heart does it best I think. Everything you will hear from the record is displayed in some form in those first two tracks, which sets up the album nicely.
I can’t imagine another song opening that album. The notion that it doesn’t work as an opener is wild to me.
Im surprised its never been brought up here. It was a big point of contention for me and my buddies when the album came out lol. Maybe im just the minority.
"Gotta Be Somebody's Blues" opening Chase This Light. It's already tonally a little bit of a weird fit on that album and starting with it would set entirely the wrong mood.
I feel like some of the closers would make epically awful openers. Imagine starting an album with "Goodbye Sky Harbor"!
Drugs Or Me would be a hilariously awful opener. The album would lose its mid tempo center piece and its companion track, Pain, would have its transition awkwardly cut. Polaris also benefits from being after Drugs Or Me as it slowly walks the album back on track in the original. It would throw the whole album in a loop
Heart is a great opener. If anything I think My Best Theory should be flipped with Evidence in the tracklisting.
there isn't a great choice for another opener on the album but HIHTF would slot perfectly in the "single" third/fourth slot on the album
I also think it would help Higher Devotion too. It feels like the natural choice after My Best Theory Heart -> Evidence -> Theory -> Devotion
I like My Best Theory a lot and I always have Heart is Hard to Find is a perfect opener I have it tattooed on my arm Evidence is an underrated song
Okay, I listened to Invented again with the four track opener I mentioned above on my way back from work and I really, really like Heart -> Evidence. I also adore MBT -> Higher Devotion, but I think MBT does not work well as the third track at all. It felt super jarring to me. However, as I was listening to it, it made me think about how I would love it as a penultimate/near the end song. It's incredibly anthemic to me in the way that say, Nearer My God's Won't Drown is (which is the second to last song of the record). Futures has the same structure too where Nothingwrong is one last burst of energy until the album wraps itself neatly with Night Drive/23. If it came just before Invented/Mixtape, it would juxtapose really well with the former; Theory is barking certainty, "feel[ing] the air rush down from the center, not like one side is any better", belting assumptions as fact. Meanwhile, the title track equally "feels"; "You're always in my head [...] I live in constant debt to feel you, invented". The release of energy from MBT going into the sensation of letting go, with the almost mourning soundscapes of the title track would be very interesting I think. In related observations, this is probably my 6th time listening to this record this week. Wanna thank the thread for that as although I've always liked it, I'm really starting to adore how thematically intertwined this record is. "Invented", being a word that ultimately means "made up", is just an excellent word choice in an album sprinkled with such synonyms. It's no surprise that tracks are titled My Best "Theory" and "Movielike", both words that could boil down to being "not-yet-proven-as-fact" or "almost-fictional". Even the choruses have this assumptive language to them, like Higher Devotion's "psychic screaming", Stop's "I see it all in my head", and Littlething's "eating away at my mind"; they all stem from a lack of communication, leading the narrator to draw conclusions based off of their own evidence. Which leads me to Evidence, being such a concrete word. It's perfectly used in the context of this album, as the song states that it's being covered up (and later affirms that although doing so, nothing cleans it). I mentioned this in the previous pages, but the way I interpret a song like Mixtape too is the narrator going down memory lane as they're listening to an old tape from a past relationship, reliving those moments over and over, as long as they can, unable to walk away from a past that has already escaped them. Invented fucking rules.