Music / Ending Fatigue

Sometimes, not only is a song unusually long, but it will reach a point that seems like it's supposed to be the end but then keeps going. Sometimes a song will even have a fake-out ending intentionally. In one of his humorous music-snarkery books, Tom Reynolds referred to this phenomenon as "Rasputin Syndrome" (after the Russian monk who famously survived numerous attempts at assassination).

Half of the premise of this old Dudley Moore pastiche of a Beethoven piano sonata. Even the pianist eventually can't hide his frustration.
In Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra, there's a musically-played-out argument between Bailey and the orchestra about which party gets the final notes of the performance. The orchestra plays different endings à la Dudley Moore.
CDs vs. LPs. They both have their advantages and disadvantages as far as sound quality goes, but CDs can hold 80 minutes of music, while it's difficult to find an LP that can hold more than 50. Musicians feel compelled to fill up the entire CD so the listener can get their money's worth, which leads to lots and lots of filler.
Several tracks by Godspeed You! Black Emperor don't really end as much as disintegrate; once the crescendo of the song has been reached, the band will prolong the aftermath in ambiance or noise for minutes on end. Examples: "East Hastings" and "Static". Then there are tracks like "Storm" and "9-15-00", which will spend 15 minutes building on one idea only to shift into a completely separate-sounding coda.
- F# A# Infinity's vinyl edition ends on a locked groove. Thus, the last song literally goes on forever with two notes unless the listener finally takes the clue and removes the needle. Fridge Brilliance, natch.
Pendulum's albums usually have final tracks that contain false endings, one of which is used incredibly well in "The Tempest" which ends their 2008 album In Silico with an Epic Rocking part that goes on for 2 minutes. However, one particularly odd case is "Encoder", which ends 2010's Immersion. There's a fade-in cymbal which you think marks the end of the song, then a Coldplayish part fades in that musically is out of place completely with the rest of the song. then once you think it's over, we are subject to a full minute of water splashing and heavy breathing, then the song finally ends as a wham noise begins to fade in but cuts out. It's a good song, but it's annoying the first couple times you hear it.
Billy Idol's "Mony Mony" has a whole third verse when you've think you've gotten to the last chorus.
Unearth's "Grave of Opportunity" ends with a very long guitar note. The guitarist then plays a quick riff and abruptly stops. What's worse is that this song is featured as a bonus song in Guitar Hero World Tour. It's a very fun song to play, but that last note is always annoying.
Averted in Blind Guardian's "And Then There Was Silence". The song has three such points, but they're all rather short and are used more like act breaks to shift points of view in the story. The song "The Maiden and the Minstrel Knight", however, does this at the end. The music and singing reach a crescendo, then start to trail off, then five seconds of silence and the music and singing come back, full force.
Hunters & Collectors' "Throw Your Arms Around Me" is exactly this, especially its live version.
Seemingly just to screw with the listener, The Flaming Lips' "Scratching The Door" starts fading out where you'd expect the song to end, only to fade back in. Then it happens again. And a third time. Then it finally ends. This takes up two minutes of the song.
Mew's "Comforting Sounds". The song is done and dusted after four minutes; the remaining five minutes are spent repeating one theme about ten times. Granted, it gets some embellishments, and is more epic as it goes along, but by the seventh time around the loop you're forced to wonder how much more they can do with it. And there's still an acoustic outro after what Guitar Hero might have called the End Wankery section.
The Irish band Hothouse Flowers had one huge hit in the '80s, a song called "Don't Go". They now milk this for all its worth with a live version of the song that lasts for at least 20 minutes.
The Eight Steps by Joe Satriani, fading back in to continue the end solo that was going on before the fade out.
Futurama has a bit of a Self-Deprecation in Beck's guest star episode. While singing a song, a standard time-cut is shown, and Beck ends the song, then says:
Beck: Wow. That song usually doesn't last for three hours, but we kinda got into a thing... and then I forgot how it ended....
Caïna's second album Mourner suffered from this a little bit.
Anton Bruckner's symphonies go on for hours pretending to end.
In a very rare Country Music example, Keith Urban has done this a few times:
- He jams for about 2 minutes at the end of "Somebody Like You", and does some lesser jamming on "Better Life".
- "Once in a Lifetime" also shed about 2 minutes (out of a possible 6) between album version and radio edit.
- "Stupid Boy" is possibly the worst offender, as it's one of the only ballads he's done that's gotten this treatment. The song is 6:12 on the album, but only 3:46 for the radio edit.
- "Everybody" also has a lot of vamping, but with an orchestra instead.
Woven Hand's "Animalitos (Ain't No Sunshine)" is 14 minutes long, with at least four fakeout endings.
The song "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" by They Might Be Giants is not especially long or boring. In fact, it's rather short and enjoyable. It is still very confusing to hear "And now this song is over now and now this song is over now and now this song is over now, this song is over now," and then have the song keep going for another minute or so. Oh TMBG, you amuse me so.
- Several songs on 1996's Factory Showroom went on about a minute longer than they really needed to.
The Jesus Lizard's "Panic in Cicero". The song stops. The drums don't. For, like, two minutes. The majority of the song is the never-ending ending.
Motörhead's "Overkill" has two false endings, before the double kick starts up again and the song continues. Though this was obviously intentional, given the song title.
Adiemus' "Cu Challain" from their fourth album, The Eternal Knot. The song pauses twice where it could and should end. As such, it feels like three songs Frankensteined together.
Handel's Messiah. After two hours, the final chorus has three distinct sections to it. The third of these sections consists of ten pages of 'Amen' sung fugal style, which was written as an afterthought.
- And the iconic "Hallelujah!" segment that everyone remembers isn't even the end of the piece. It's just the end of the second part of three.
Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I do it for You" has a significant pause around 2:45 which most people remember, but it also has another one around 3:45 that most people forget about.
Knights of the 21st Century by HammerFall ends, then has about a minute and a half of silence before briefly reprising the opening, which consists of a few seconds of groaning followed by "Hell fuckin' yeah! The Prophecy!"
Delta Goodrem has committed this trope twice, once in Believe Again, which has excess intro and outro to the tune of 80 extra seconds, and both the intro and outro could've been cut in half or not used AT ALL. The second time she did this was with Control which has an excess of 42 seconds free style singing at the end for no reason. It has a clear finale at the point of 3.19!
The lyrics of Milliontown by Frost* end around 17 minutes into the song. The song continues with an instrumental section, which itself has a bit of a false outro, until around 25 minutes, where it apparently ends. After about 30 seconds of silence, a short piano section is played and the song ends at about 26 and a half minutes.
"A Pleasant Shade of Gray" by Fates Warning has a bit of this. At the very end of the song, there is a short pause followed by the sound of an alarm clock ringing for about 15 seconds.
Lady Gaga does this at the very end of "Poker Face". You think she's stopped singing, but she repeats the lines over and over.
Korpiklaani: The title track of Korven Kuningas, which is also the final track, ends with a repetitive bit of booming percussion. This repeats for 15 minutes, three times the length of the actual song.
"Even Rats" by The Slip has a rather long, repetitive wordless vocal coda.
Video game music example: The "Castle" music in the TurboGrafx CD version of Monster Lair (which used Redbook audio) has a really long violin solo that seems to go on forever before finally fading out (you'll only hear it all on a CD player). The boss music is also rather long, with half-a-dozen guitar solos and a Truck Driver's Gear Change near the end; in-game, the Boss Battle will time-out before you hear the whole thing.
Relient K's song, Deathbed suffers from this. Several times throughout the song it starts to wind down or appear to be ending, only to suddenly start into another verse. After several times of this, one starts wishing the guy on his deathbed would just die already.
Also, "I'm Your Captain" by Grand Funk Railroad. The song is pretty fantastic. Then you get to the halfway point and the singer keeps saying "I'm getting closer to my home." over and over again.
"Everybody Hates My Guitar Sound" by Beat Crusaders (best known for the fourth opening of Bleach. Only its ending consists of a really long and bad guitar solo. They end up getting booed into shutting up.
ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" seems to go on for an awkward amount of time after starting to fade out. There's also an extended version that has a disco-inspired breakdown in the middle.
The end of the song "Assassins" by Nachtmystium fits this trope. Who REALLY wants to hear an entire minute of the same synth buzzing noise over and over again?
The song "...Before I Leave!" by Czech metal band Root. It clocks in at 19:36, but the last two-thirds of it consist of singing the final stanza repeatedly after the rest of the instruments have left.
Yo La Tengo has a tendency to tack on 10-20 minutes of repetitive, anxiety-inducing noise-symphonies to the end of albums that in no way enhance the tone of the album, possibly in an effort to never make a perfect album. Most notorious examples: "I Can Feel The Heart Beating As One" and "Popular Songs."
Done deliberately in the Monty Python song "I'm So Worried". Ending of third to last verse: "I'm so worried about whether I should go on, or whether I should just stop." Beginning of second to last verse: "I'm so worried about whether I ought to have stopped. And I'm so worried 'cause it's the sort of thing I ought to know." Beginning of final verse: "I'm so worried about whether I should have stopped then. I'm so worried that I'm driving everyone round the bend." Note that when the final verse starts, you hear the backing chorus come back into the room, as though even they thought it was over. You can also hear an audibly frustrated sigh in the background.
Chicago's "Fancy Colours." It's a good song, but at the end, all you get is extremely loud obnoxious long notes repeated over and over.
"Pretend We're Dead" by L7. "We're deeeeaaaaaaaaaad" about 12 times, with the only variation being a very short, simple guitar solo towards the end.
Malcolm Arnold's "A Grand, Grand Overture", for comic effect.
Opeth seem to suffer from this trope a lot. Almost every song has a riff that seems to be cut short before being repeated with a remarkably machinelike (and monotonous) accuracy over and over again...and over again.
Bruce Springsteen's "Born In the USA" has a very long, drawn-out ending in which the chords repeat over and over while the drummer does some cool fills.
The tracks from Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man album. "25th Century Quaker" and "Kandy Korn" make up for it with their shorter lengths and neat ideas (the former showing off an Eastern, proto-Krautrock dirge; the latter containing a hilarious jingle for candy corn), while the title track and "Tarotplane" just go on and on with no variation.
Potentially subverted with "Desolation Row" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again", both by Bob Dylan. While the songs basically contain the same verse sections with no bridges, the phantasmagorical lyrics have the listener wanting to find out what happens next. Still, it might be played straight for those not into Dylan's voice or lyrics.
- "Like A Rolling Stone" started out as this. Dylan had about 10 to 20 pages worth of verses and considering the average length of a verse was about a minute and a half, that version probably would've taken up an entire LP. Fortunately, Dylan picked the best parts and put them together in the form we know today.
Syd Barrett's "Gigolo Aunt" is this to some fans. While the main part of the song is considered good, the ending jam just meanders.
Invoked by Paul and Storm as an Overly Long Gag at the end of "Shake Machine" (as the separate track "Shake Machine, Part II"). The track consists of eighty-eight seconds worth of fake-out endings (and one final ending)...after Part I's already lengthy ending.
The Barenaked Ladies song "Grade 9" has great fun with this trope, building up to two false endings before the real one.
The Lambeth Walk, the closer for the first act of Me & My Girl, is a Chorus-Only Song that repeats for 5 minutes, changing keys each time.
- Oh no, it doesn't stop there. You hear it ONE MORE TIME as you go into intermission.
- But, come on, 2 reprises of the catchiest song in the show still ain't enough, let's do the WHOLE THING AGAIN at curtain call near the end of the show, AND THIS TIME LET'S GET THE ENTIRE THEATRE TO DO IT WITH US!!
Autechre's drone ambient piece "Perlence Subrange 6-36" is 58 minutes, and the second half is mostly a repeat of the first half.
The several-minute-long harpsichord solo towards the end of the first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 5. It keeps sounding like it's going to end and the rest of the orchestra is going to come in, but no, the solo just keeps going.
- Unless you're familiar with classical concerto form, in which this type of extended solo before the final cadence (called a cadenza) is a standard feature.
The finale of Joseph Haydn's String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 33, No. 2, aka "The Joke", sounds like a normal rondo until the end of the piece, when there's a grand pause. Then he starts the piece over with the four-phrase main theme, with two measures of silence between each phrase - and then four measures of silence, followed by the first phrase again, at which point the piece ends, in the musical equivalent of the middle of a sentence. Audiences had no idea when to applaud, as the piece just kept going.
Pulp's "The Day After the Revolution", the final track from their album This is Hardcore, comes to a natural halt at around the five-minute mark; but a held strings chord continues for the next nine minutes, at which point lead singer Jarvis Cocker helpfully bids us goodbye.
The harpsichord flourish ending a recitative (the second movement) of the P.D.Q. Bach cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn (it starts around 2:35 in the video and lasts a little over a minute). P.D.Q. Bach has so much of this. Notes held for incredibly long amounts of time, little things that are four or five times as long as they "should" be... it's one of his most common gags, behind blatantly ridiculous instruments. A prime example is the Schleptet in E-Flat Major, which opens with two insanely long-held chords, separated by the wind players taking a deep, loud, comical breath. (And these are not fermatas — the opening is scored in a ridiculous time signature, something like 72/4.) In live performances, the usual schtick has the horn player black out from holding the second note, falling off the chair, and taking the music stand to the floor with a crash. (Which, for a musician untrained in physical slapstick, can be hazardous, and has sometimes resulted in a damaged horn, or a damaged horn player!) He would also end pieces on unresolved chords
Allan Sherman has "The End of a Symphony," which directly addresses the tendency in classical music for long, drawn-out endings. In the piece (which runs over eight minutes) he complains about this while offering multiple parodic examples.
The dance remix of "Where You Are" by Jessica Simpson is 11 minutes, but mostly repeats the final refrain over and over for the last 5 minutes, preceded by a fake ending.
These can be painful to listen to live. Any song with a Fake-Out Fade-Out and a not perfectly knowledgeable fanbase is going to end up with a lot of people applauding in the wrong place and then being very annoyed and/or confused when the song keeps going.
Dinosaur Jr.'s "Said The People" has what feels like a natural Solo Out conclusion, until it comes back for another verse, another chorus, and another solo.
Kanye West
- "Last Call", the closer from The College Dropout, lasts 12 minutes, starting with an excellent 4-minute track and spending the last 8 minutes in a monologue of Kanye's career up to that point,
- "We Major", from Late Registration, which goes on for a good two more minutes than it should,
- "Runaway", from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, where a Subdued Section about 6 minutes in leads into what can best be described as "three minutes of vocoder wankery."
- The music video version of "All of the Lights". It almost has beginning fatigue in the music video with the string orchestra intro, then goes on for instrumentals and repeats the chorus for almost a minute after where the radio and album versions end.
Alan Jackson:
- "Long Way to Go" drags on and on because he repeats the chorus four times in a row at the end.
- "I Still Like Bologna" also has a third verse that basically spins its wheels and only drags the four-verse song down some.
- On "Country Boy", he couldn't decide whether to use one of two different bridges, so he just used both. And then he repeats the chorus twice on top of that.
The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" has a keyboard break that goes on for half a minute, and you'd think that's when the song ends. Nope. After about half a minute, the break ends, then the rest of the band joins in.
- The album version of "Who Are You" is 6:27, and the single is only marginally better: 5:06. The US radio edit cuts it down to 3:27, slicing three whole minutes.
- "You Better You Bet" clocks in at 5:36, most of the second half of which is the chorus ("When I say I love you, you say you better / You better, you better, you bet!")
- Live versions of Who songs tend to get lengthened, even short ones like "Magic Bus", which becomes a ten-minute jam (though the fatigue is generally averted here).
Art Blakey's legendary rendition of A Night in Tunisia last for about 11 minutes... of which, about 2 and half minutes consists of them winding down to ending. Just take a listen for yourself.
Arlo Guthrie's hilarious song "Alice's Restaurant" clocks in at a little over 18 minutes. It could easily have ended with the resolution of the littering plot... but then he reveals he came to talk about the draft for the Vietnam War, which is only somewhat connected to the littering plot, then starts talking about walking into a therapist's office singing "Alice's Restaurant", then gets the audience to sing it with him twice, which have to wait for the right spot to come around in the melody...
- In some versions, Guthrie lampshades it during the Audience Participation part: "I've been playing this song for 15 minutes. I can play it for another 15 minutes. I'm not proud... or tired..."
- An updated version that Arlo sang in The New '10s includes yet another monologue about an urban legend regarding the song as it relates to the Watergate scandal.^note
The Proclaimers' album track "Oh Jean" ends with four minutes of a repeated riff accompanied by singing of the title, both getting louder and louder, suggesting that any time soon they're going to launch into another rousing rendition of the chorus - but it never happens. Eventually the riffing just stops and the track ends there.
Catatonia's "Karaoke Queen" proclaims in the chorus that "it's just a three-minute song, it doesn't last very long". Uh-huh. It's a five-minute song because the outro ("ooh sha la la, ooh sha la la" repeat) goes on forever.
"Sylvie" by Saint Etienne has to be lampshading this, with "Over and over and over and over again" about eleven times in a row - each one carefully timed to overlap the previous on the -gain of "again", resulting in "over and over and over and over a/over and over and over and over a/over and over..." etc.
Spoofed by Radio Active in their Status Quo parody "Boring Song (by Status Quid)". Each time the "final" guitar chord starts to fade away, the song starts up again, with lyrics lampshading the song's apparent refusal to end.
"It's No Game (Part 1)" by David Bowie does this intentionally; once you think the song's about to end, Robert Fripp's guitar solo starts to drag on, prompting Bowie to give Fripp three Big "SHUT UP!"s.
"Moonchild", by King Crimson. Basically a two-and-a-half-minute song with a ten-minute-long improv piece tacked at the end that goes nowhere. It got so bad that for the newest reissue Robert Fripp cut off about two minutes of it.
Repeatedly Played for Laughs by none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in his four movement A Musical Joke.
"Adonai", by Hurt. The song ends... and then a quiet recording of someone chanting a prayer plays for a while (at least a minute) before finally Fading into the Next Song.
"Sinner Man" by Nina Simone seems to be ending at the eight-minute mark, only to continue for another two minutes with some A Cappella scatting and a drum solo.
Devo has been known, in concert, to play a thirty-minute version of Jocko Homo, in Mark Motherbaughs words, "until people were actually fighting with us, trying to make us stop playing the song. We'd just keep going, "Are we not men? We are Devo!" for like 25 minutes, directed at people in an aggressive enough manner that even the most peace-lovin' hippie wanted to throw fists."
Magazine intentionally invoke this trope at the end of 'I Wanted Your Heart', a song Nick Kent of the New Musical Express picked out as a masterpiece, which it is, right up until the last minute when the band seemingly find themselves having some sort of vaguely Captain Beefheart style jam that seems completely out of place in the context of both the song and the album.
The music tracks in OutRun loop their final section until you complete the race, which is especially annoying with "Magical Sound Shower", where it sounds like a broken record.
Dance remixes and dance songs in general will sometimes have false leads outs, often containing little more than the beat, mid-way through the track to give DJ's an option to mix out. Often if you kept playing the track, you might get a repeat of the first part, a reprise that repeats or sometimes instrumentation. Worst-case scenario is when the 'true' ending to the track will be a fade-out or a cold stop (with no beat-only outro) making the DJ's wish he would have taken the mid-track lead out instead to get a cleaner mix.
Donald Fagen, and Steely Dan in general. The outros to his songs tend to start at about the halfway mark of the track and just. keep. going. Notable examples: "West of Hollywood" and "Tomorrow's Girls".
Electric Light Orchestra's famous "Mr. Blue Sky" seems to have a proper fade-out at the 3:48 mark...but then goes into Ominous Latin Chanting and Last Note Nightmare for another minute and a half.
Ravel's famous Bolero goes on for about 15 minutes, which is probably five times as long as it needs to be. It's like Ravel knew he was on to a good thing and didn't want to let go.
Michael Jackson became prone to this post-Thriller. Like Meat Loaf, he also has bad cases of starting fatigue.
- "Man in the Mirror" hits this at the "I'm gonna make that change/It's gonna feel real good!" part, since the previous chorus capped off with the na-na-nas was a perfectly fine way to end the song.
- The full-length version of the "Black or White" video has the notorious "panther dance" epilogue, which goes on for several minutes after the actual song has long since ended, and doesn't seem to logically/thematically follow on with what previously happened in the clip. The quick payoff with Homer and Bart Simpson really isn't worth it. (The album version has starting fatigue thanks to a superfluous Slash solo and a skit with the kid and the dad who wants him to turn his music down.)
- "Will You Be There" has two choral preludes, the first of which is nicked from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (which initially went uncredited). Then, after he stops singing, he offers a spoken-word prayer to God. The single edit drops all this...and is thus slightly less than half the length of the album edit.
- The Brazillian favela version of the "They Don't Care About Us" Music Video goes on for almost two-and-a-half minutes after the song itself ends; the time is filled by an extended drum solo for the Olodum troupe, as Michael prances, mugs, and occasionally shouts non-words along to the beat. Not surprisingly, there's an official edit that cuts out most of this.
- "HIStory" could have cut at least a minute off its 6:46 running time if they'd dropped all the soundbites and recitations of famous dates in history from the beginning and especially the end. To make matters worse, while this would have been an appropriate closer for the HIStory album with its upbeat tempo and attitude, there's still two more tracks to go afterward: the Glurge-laden "Little Susie" and the Cover Version of Charlie Chaplin's "Smile", which itself has trouble ending.
Sibelius' Fifth Symphony has a unique ending. The symphony builds to its conclusion in several waves of sound and at just the point where you might think there's nothing more to say... everything ends and there are six sudden explosions of whole-orchestra noise, like hammer blows, at two or three-second intervals - six false endings, in fact.
Colbie Caillat was guilty of this with "Breaking At the Cracks". Roughly a minute and a half or so of her repeating "Love, I need you back" ad nauseam.
John Mayer's "Say (What You Need To Say)" ends with so many repetitions of the title phrase that one gets the feeling that she'd like to say what she needs to say, but he won't shut up long enough to let her do so.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song Babe I'm on Fire without the Music video. Fourteen minutes of repeating fairly similar lyrics with each increasingly silly variation on who says the titular phrase being ending with the same musical sting that could be the ending.
"Abacab" by Genesis.
"Suzy Q" by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Steve Vai's "Fuck Yourself" lasts for a reasonable four minutes... and then the entire song repeats with a guitar solo instead of lyrics.
Little Big Town's "Boondocks". The coda with the repeated "You get a line, I get a pole / We'll go fishin' in the crawfish hole / Five-card poker on Saturday night / Church on Sunday morning" goes on for well over a minute. It was mercifully cut down on the radio edit.
"Born to Fly" by Sara Evans. The album version has a nearly one-and-a-half-minute instrumental ending.
The Mars Volta. At one point during the last, 30-minute-long track of Frances the Mute, you can feel the song itself getting a little tired.
Enzo Siffredi's "High On Trumpets" is 7 minutes long, but after the climax comes (shortly before the 5-minute mark), the remaining 2 minutes are nothing but the dull, looping background percussion part — almost makes the song sound like it was unfinished.
"Texas (When I Die)" by Tanya Tucker. The chorus repeats six times at the end.
The album version of Tony! Toni! Toné!'s "Anniversary" (on Sons of Soul) is nine minutes and twenty-four seconds long. The actual song ends somewhere around 4:30. After thirty more seconds of repetition ^note, at around 5:00, the instrumental outro comes in, which consists of the entire song being played over again, but with different, almost drifting, vocals. Needless to say, the radio edit clipped the last five minutes.
The song "Girls Like You" by The Naked and Famous, despite being Awesome Music, suffers from this trope more than it should. It may be the last song on the Passive Me, Aggressive You album, but the song's ending patterns of distorted guitars and synths go on for 2 more minutes after the song actually ends.
The Bob Seger song "Night Moves" has it happen very jarringly, with a fairly poignant line about how "the night moves... when autumn's closing in..." fade out, and then jump to an entire rehash of the chorus.
The The "Uncertain Smile". More than one radio moderator complained about the outro that seems to be longer than the rest of the song.
Metallica themselves stated that this was the reason for their going in a softer, more poppish direction. Kirk Hammett has stated that he isn't a fan of ...And Justice For All because the songs were "too fucking long" and noted one incident in particular- a grueling concert during the Damaged Justice tour, where he saw "the entire front row yawn after the 8th minute" of the eponymous track.
While he avoided it on his albums, Prince had a tendency to let solos and instrumentals go on ad nauseam in concert. Concert versions of "Purple Rain" would play the last twelve or so bars, including the suspended note, twenty times before it properly ended!! And his controversial performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," at a tribute show for George Harrison, featured a 4+-minute electric guitar solo long after Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and Jeff Lynne ended the song proper.
"Monoliths" by Lotus Plaza features a repeated coda that takes up slightly more than half of the song.
In Supa Scoopa & Mighty Scoop, Kyuss plays the final riff nine times with increasingly prolonged pauses. This is the same group that eventually led to Queens of the Stone Age - famous abusers of fake endings in their songs.
Low do tend to drone on a bit in their slow, minimalist rock workouts, but one example particularly stands out: "Born By The Wires" from the Songs For A Dead Pilot EP. The song ends with several minutes of a single chord being strummed every several seconds, stretching a nearly six-minute song to thirteen. It's either really mellow and hypnotic, or it'll just drive you up the wall.
"I Can't Love You Back" by Easton Corbin is four-and-a-half minutes long, nearly half of which is an instrumental coda that repeats the main melodic hook ad nauseam.
In the Elvis Presley song "Suspicious Minds", the song begins to fade out over the coda, only to then fade back in and continue in the same vein for another minute or so. Considering that the final lyrics when this happens are "I'm caught in a trap / I can't walk out / Because I love you too much, baby", this is entirely intensional.
Just when you thought Hazel O'Connor's song "Will You" had come to a satisfying end, a couple of seconds later a brief drum riff leads into a blistering two-minute sax solo by Wesley McGoogan. It's virtually two epic songs for the price of one.
Trying to end one of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies is a very tedious process.
- The Fifth Symphony is a big offender. The Presto section at the end of the finale (beginning at bar 364 of 446), which is scored for full orchestra throughout, goes on for over six pages in one edition of the score (out of just over fifty) and could achieve an epic ending almost anywhere after the second page, but instead it goes on and on and on. The last 29 bars of the symphony consist entirely of C major triads repeated over and over until at last, the orchestra plays a final-sounding C major chord... and then another... and then another... and then three more... and another... and finally a unison C. One has the impression Beethoven couldn't decide which ending to use, so he decided to use them all, one after the other. As noted by the commentary in Peter Schickele's "New Horizons in Music Appreciation", even just the first movement has some fake-outs.
  Pete: Wait a minute! The brasses have taken the theme! They're not letting it stop! They're taking the theme and running ahead! Bob, this piece is definitely going to go into overtime, I can see that.
  - Can be considered as somewhat justified, since the finale is in C major and really wants to establish C major as the end of the journey from the beginning in C minor.
- Pointing to any phrase on the last two pages of the Seventh Symphony will give you a satisfactorily epic ending. BUT NO.
- Beethoven parodied this himself in the finale of the Eighth Symphony. After a compact movement, the themes are developed again, and then brought back as if the exposition again before moving to a different key for a few bars and then moving back... and doing a similar, but more exaggerated thing with the Fifth and just standing on the same chord 45 times.
- The finale of the Ninth Symphony builds toward a fast, loud climax, but gets interrupted several times by abrupt slowdowns. By this point the lyrics of the "Ode to Joy" have been exhausted, so the words from previous sections are reused.
Gorillaz:
- The album version of "Clint Eastwood" could have finished succinctly around the 3:15 mark by fading out on a final "my future is coming on" refrain from 2D. Instead the vocal refrain continues to loop until 3:45, then the instrumental portion continues for another 2 minutes, with a total length of 5:40. Radio stations would cut out about half way through the instrumental portion, and the video clip version, seemingly recognising this issue, cuts the song itself down to 3:50, but adds a 40 second long outro for a kind of credit sequence for the characters.
- The Soul Child remix of "19/2000" repeats Noodle's section two extra times at the end, making the song about 2 minutes longer than the original version.
"I Love It Loud" by KISS. It starts to fade out and it seems like the end to the song, but it fades back in even louder, just under a minute before the song fades out again.
"Human Touch" by Rick Springfield. At about the point where you think the song is going to end (about 3:20) cue unnecessary guitar work, keyboards, and repeating of the chorus for another four minutes.
Thanks to Jeff Buckley's well-known Cover Version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", most other cover artists neglect some of the original song's most poignant verses in favor of repeating "hallelujah" over and over again, for a solid two minutes. Good luck finding a cover that doesn't.
The first and third movements of "Embryons desséchés" by Erik Satie each end with a ridiculous number of final chords relative to their length (eighteen consecutive G major chords in the first movement and over two dozen F major chords in the third).
Meat Loaf songs tend to be on the long side. "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" is a whopping 8 minutes and 30 seconds, "Like A Bat Out Of Hell" is 9 minutes and 52 seconds, and "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" runs for roughly 12 minutes. In short, never select a Meat Loaf song for karaoke. Everyone will hate you.
This is how Rivers of Nihil feels about the touring cycle for Monarchy, and it was one of the bigger factors in the substantial change in sound on Where Owls Know My Name. While Monarchy did a lot to establish them as a band with teeth rather than an overhyped upstart that was going to drop off the face of the earth once their fifteen minutes of fame were up, they felt that the touring cycle for the album had roughly six good months followed by a whole lot of nothing and just kept dragging on and on, and by the end of the 2017 edition of Devastation on the Nation (the last tour in support of Monarchy), they felt like they had dragged it out well past the point of justifiability and had far less to show for it than they had hoped for, which led them to more or less say "fuck it" and go for broke on what wound up being their true watershed album.
The Oasis album Be Here Now is loaded to the brim with songs over five minutes, and quite a few end up like this, such as the two minutes of noodling and "la la la" that closes "All Around the World". Noel Gallagher even said he expected the label to cut the intro to "D'You Know What I Mean?" (which lasts about a minute before the lead vocals come in), but they didn't.
José González's song, Cycling Trivialities, has a crescendo near the logical endpoint of the song, before going into a decrescendo and repeating the same phrase 27 times, at which point it finally ends. The repeated phrase is pleasant the first few times but quickly becomes monotonous.
Iron Maiden has it at times. "The Angel and the Gambler" ends with the chorus being repeated 7 times. "The Red and the Black" has an instrumental section that goes for 6 minutes. "Empire of the Clouds" returns to the pared-down sound that made for a Slow-Paced Beginning, and the calm delivery makes every verse feel like it could be the last.
The lack of production polish is one of the charms of the early transitional Ska and Blue Beat records from Jamaica in The '60s, leading up to the birth of Reggae. But one issue is that the producers really didn't know when to fade out the songs, and they just go on and on. "Do The Reggay" by Toots & The Maytals, the song that gave the genre its name, sounds like it should end around the 2:15 mark, but there's almost a minute left to go at that point.
"Trip to Heaven" by epic house/progressive trance act Blue Amazon, in addition to being 14 minutes long overall, has a 5-minute ambient coda that overstays its welcome.
Gary Moore's song "No Reason To Cry" is 9 minutes long...and roughly 6-7 of those minutes are instrumental. Also, roughly 3/4 of the instrumental is at the end of the song, with no lyrics.
Al Stewart's songs "Year of the Cat" and "Time Passages" are both around 7 minutes long, but contain extremely long instrumentals after their bridges, before the final verses. However, Tropes Are Not Bad in this case.
Jefferson Starship's song "Miracles" gets pretty monotonous at the end, and it's also close to 7 minutes. But once again, Tropes Are Not Bad.
Eminem:
- "Bad Guy" is a Murder Ballad about Eminem getting done in by a Loony Fan. He dies at just over the 5 minute mark, prompting a beat-switch and a verse in which Slim Shady explains the moral of what had just happened for another two minutes over a backing with no drums. Even then, he carries on rapping over the fade-out. Note that fans often regard this verse as one of his greatest ever, and an emotional high point.
- Slim gets Cappadonia to cut the track off at the end of "SHADYXV", but then carries on without a beat for another block of verses, until he just fades out.
Blotto's "Metal Head", does this on purpose with multiple fake endings, but it is gently spoofing bands that did that.
The Balearic extended mix of Ondina's "Summer Of Love" has a fake percussion-only lead-out at the 4:35 mark, where a DJ may choose to mix into another song, but then builds back up via an instrumental piano break, followed by a final run-through of the main synth riff and chorus before stopping in the same manner as the radio mix.

Ending Fatigue / Music

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