You know who the secret hero of your post is, in my opinion? Shania Twain. You may recall that your purchase of Up! got you two discs: one with a country mix of the songs, another with a pop mix of the same songs. But although the album qualified for double RIAA credit, Twain eschewed it (basically feeling it didn’t pass the smell test). Up! ended up being certified for 11 million copies in the United States, no small beer, but had Twain not been principled about it, the record would be ranked as the fifth best-selling record of all time (tied with Back in Black, also produced by Mutt).

I sure do, and funny you mention that: I’m about to do an Idolator post on this very topic. The whole RIAA all-time list is filled with sham “best-sellers” (and their names are The Wall, Billy Joel Greatest Hits Vols. I & II, and…yes, The White Album).

It was huge. It was an event. It debuted at number one, back when that meant something (I think it was the third album to do so).

All correct, as well as everything else you said. I still think Songs is overrated as an album (overstuffed, to be specific; gimme Innervisions over Songs any day), but there’s no denying it was a cultural event and a culmination to one of the most amazing runs in pop-music history. And the best tracks on it positively kill.

(in re Chris’s interesting old blog post)
You know that double albums get counted for twice the sales, right? That’s almost certainly why Songs in the Key of Life is Wonder’s best-seller.

Also: I think of Use Your Illusion as one mega-album that got split into two for marketing purposes. I think of Human Touch and Lucky Town as two separate albums, albeit ones without a clear distinction between them. (Actually, I think of them as Springsteen’s biggest misstep ever. So far as I can tell, there was no motivation for that project beyond “I can have two albums on top of the charts too!” It was poetic justice that neither of them hit #1.)

Your edit is slightly more severe than mine. (Glad to see you didn’t try to get it all the way down to vinyl length!) As you see on my old blog post, at first I got it down to 90 minutes, but if you scroll down to my addendum comment, I eventually got it down to single-CD length by chopping a few more songs and using audio-editing software (a cheat, I know) to make some of the keeper songs shorter. (“Roses,” the album’s third single/Top 10 hit, is six minutes in its original form!) Final number of songs: 22.

I haven’t read this blog post of mine in years, but I ended up digressing into a discussion of double-albums in general. Basically, you and I were on the same wavelength on all this.

Key excerpt of my post–on OutKast specifically–if you don’t feel like reading all of my blather:

[A] couple of listens have already convinced me I’ve created a better album. And it’s amazing, almost infuriating, how easily Boi’s songs and Dre’s songs work together. They really could have had their very own White Album, a pastiche of Boi songs and Dre songs complementing and commenting on each other. The strategy they chose instead shows, at worst, a failure of courage, or at best that they didn’t realize what they had. Much as McCartney and Lennon are wrongly oversimplified as “the melodic one” and “the rockin’ one,” Dre and Boi are more complex – and closer to each other – than casual fans or even they themselves might suspect.