With his 12-minute and 20-second-long track, “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time,” André 3000 has set a new record for the longest song to make the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The majority of songs that hit the charts fall around an average of 3 minutes and 15 seconds long. Although only one song from André 3000’s new album, ‘New Blue Sun,’ come anywhere close to that average. As his first album in 17 years, André 3000 surprised himself and his fans with an entirely instrumental tracklist – not a single bar dropped throughout the entire album.
Holding just 8 tracks, ‘New Blue Sun’ has a total run time of 1 hour and 28 minutes. The shortest song on the album, “Ninety Three ’Til Infinity and Beyoncé,” comes in still over the average at 3 minutes and 49 seconds long, while the longest, “Dreams Once Buried Beneath the Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout into Undying Gardens,” runs for a whopping 17 minutes and 11 seconds.
The song to previously hold the title of longest song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 was Tool’s “Fear Inoculum” in 2019, running for a total of 10 minutes and 21 seconds. Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)” was the previous runner up for longest song on the Billboard Hot 100. Swift’s “All Too Well,” running at 10 minutes and 13 seconds, is now in third and just behind “Fear Inoculum.”