Fadeouts – lazy songwriting or the perfect space for experimentation? Keith Urban weighs in: “That’s when all the cool stuff starts happening”The fadeout: a space for musical experimentation or just plain lazy?
They feature in some of the greatest tracks of all time – including the Eagles’ Hotel California, The Beatles’ Hey Jude, and Every Breath You Take by The Police – but some might argue that the fadeout is a way for musicians not to have to think of an outro.

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Indeed, repeating a track’s final chorus a few times as the volume slowly decreases means you don’t need to come up with a new chord progression or any major musical change in direction, but fadeouts can provide verdant ground for experimentation, and as the outro solo of Hotel California attests to, they sometimes play host to some of the greatest musical moments ever committed to tape.

And in a new interview with Billboard – in which he talks about Flow State, his new album of yacht rock covers – Australian-American country singer and guitarist Keith Urban waxes lyrical on his love of the fadeout.
“One of the areas I’ve always found that I like to go off script, if you will, is at the end of songs,” he says [via MusicRadar]. 
“People who grew up in that era where there were fades know all about turning the volume up because this amazing thing happened right at the very end of the fade – you could just hear the guitarist do something that was so cool, because typically the session players figure, ‘We’re out by now, they’re not going to use all this, we’re just now playing for playing’s sake.’ That’s when all the cool stuff starts happening.”
Urban explains how some of his biggest tracks saw his band members let loose creatively in a way they weren’t before, and that he was determined to share these sonic gems with the world.
“I’ve found so many times on my records, the reason why Stupid Boy and some of those [songs] had these long outros is what the band would do at those periods was really cool, and I didn’t want it to not be heard,” he says.

So let it be known that Keith Urban is a fan of the fadeout. But what do you think? Should artists seek to conclusively end their songs, or are fadeouts a great place for musical experimentation?
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