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Percieved vs Actual Time to Make Albums

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jw:
This is a test of the fixed-spacing formatting capabilities...  This was already posted in the original forum, although it came out quite messy there!

People often complain that U2 is taking too long to make the new album as it's been four years since the last album. Somebody countered that it's really only been two years because U2's last tour didn't end until two years ago.

So I thought I'd put together a timeline to see how long it took to make albums based on the time elapsed between the last tour date of the previous tour and the next album release date.

Of course, the following assumes that U2 spent all their non-touring time working on albums which can't be true. The chart really only shows the available window of time to make albums. But it's still more accurate than comparing time between album releases.

I assumed a Jan 1, 2009 release date for the new album to be generous.

LTD  = Last Tour Date
ARD  = Album Release Date
EAY  = Elapsed Album Years (years between albums)
EORY = Elapsed Off-Road Years (years between last tour date and album release date)

The EORY is theoretically the maximum amount of time U2 had to work on their album.
It does not take into consideration time taken off, side projects, etc.


ALBUM                   LTD          ARD            EAY   EORY
------------------------------------------------------------------
Boy                     28-Jul-80    20-Oct-80      n/a   n/a
October                 30-May-81    20-Oct-81      1.0   0.4
War                     07-Aug-82    01-Mar-83      1.4   0.6  *
Unforgettable Fire      18-Dec-83    01-Oct-84      1.6   0.8 
Joshua Tree             07-Jul-85    09-Mar-87      2.4   1.7  **
Rattle and Hum          20-Dec-87    10-Oct-88      1.6   0.8
Achtung Baby            10-Jan-90    18-Nov-91      3.1   1.9
Zooropa                 25-Nov-92    05-Jul-93      1.6   0.6 
OS1                     10-Dec-93    06-Nov-95      2.3   1.9
Pop                     06-Nov-95    03-Mar-97      1.3   1.3  ***
ATYCLB                  21-Mar-98    30-Oct-00      3.7   2.6
HTDAAB                  02-Dec-01    22-Nov-04      4.1   3.0
No Line on the Horizon  09-Dec-06    01-Jan-09      4.1   2.1


*   This is harder to pin down, there was a pre-war tour, and the main tour began before the album was released
**  Amnesty Tour dates (7 performances) were not included
*** Since OS1 did not have a tour, the OS1 release date was used for the last tour date

So if you were to list the albums in order of the time it took to make, it would look like this:


October                 0.4
War                     0.6
Zooropa                 0.6 
Unforgettable Fire      0.8 
Rattle and Hum          0.8
Pop                     1.3
Joshua Tree             1.7
Achtung Baby            1.9
OS1                     1.9
No Line on the Horizon  2.1
ATYCLB                  2.6
HTDAAB                  3.0

edgefan89:
very interesting...
still tends to be a trend of later albums taking the longest to be released

m2:
Wow -- looks great. How'd you do that, jw? Thanks for testing this.

jw:
I used the teletype option (the icon with the typewriter).  It works like the bold or italics options.

Anything inside the teletype tags will be fixed width.  Great for layout dependent text.

Unfortunately the default size is pretty small as you can see above, so it's best used with a font size tag as well.

default teletype text
10pt teletype text
12pt teletype text
14pt teletype text

m2:
Okay, let me test this, too...

Column 1          Column 2          Column 3
text here          text here          text here
more text here          more text here          more text here

fingers crossed....

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