2001 Rock Masterpiece, Lasting Over 60 Minutes, Became a Timeless Classic

In the early 2000s, Norwegian heavy metal band Green Carnation released a song with a run time of over an hour.

Released on Nov. 19, 2001, “Light of Day, Day of Darkness” clocks in at exactly 60 minutes and 6 seconds and spans the length of the entire album of the same name. The song was written by the band’s founding guitarist Terje Vik Schei — known as Tchort — and was inspired by the death of his daughter and the birth of his son.

These monumental events brought to life a powerful and emotional track that acts as a bridge between despair and hope.

“‘Light of Day, Day of Darkness’ is a story, kind of, both musically and lyrically; the story is told from A to Z,” vocalist Kjetil Nordhus told Metal Injection in a 2019 interview. “When you watch a movie, you don’t go into the movie and two-thirds of the way through watch a different ten minutes, or go directly to the first part again to back to the last part. It was an ambitious decision not to do it in tracks, because no one had done it before, but it was the right thing for that song.”

Nordhus mused that it might have been “stupid to do it this way, because it didn’t make things any easier,” but the daring choice may also be part of the reason the album got the status it did many years later. Rather than being split up for streaming services, the song is featured as one continuous track on Spotify.

He continued, “We dared to do that, to challenge people to listen to it from the first to the last second.”

Formed in Kristiansand, Norway, in 1990, the rockers released the debut studio album, Journey to the End of the Night, on May 28, 2000. From 2007 through 2014, the band went on an extended hiatus before returning to the scene in 2016 and releasing the comeback studio album, Leaves of Yesteryear, in 2020.

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