What About The Length Of An Album

I've got albums from my favorite band that are barely 40 minutes long.  I don't care, I love it...I just always wonder what convinces people to make albums of a certain length.  Is this something that people arrive at because they think the album is done, or is the number of tracks and their relative length part of some divine formula.  Just wondering...

In other news, writing in the middle of the night really helps.  I have some great tracks ready to go, and I just need to decide what is going to accompany them.  How simple or complex they will be.  But this thing is coming together in a way where I can spend mid-April to mid-May recording and see if I can release this puppy on June 1 on basically all forms of media :)

No One Knows For Sure, But That Time You Know

That time that you know that you wrote something truly brilliant.  I mean, you will be happy with all the things that you write and record, but sometimes they are things that you like personally.  They are not necessarily things that everyone is going to stand up and say "That's fucking brilliant."  However, there are those few times when you write something that you know is utterly brilliant, that's a good feeling.  It's an even better feeling when you wrote that song at 2 in the morning and it's about somebody you care about.  Yeah, that's a good feeling.  I cannot wait to really finish this work and put these songs on tape.

Instinctual Lyrics?

I wrote almost all my songs as the music first and the words second.  The music just come naturally, and I can edit it to fit in words that work well, but I have not written a whole song and then tried to write music to fit it.  There is something about instinctually putting words to the music I already have that I find oddly satisfying.  I know that people edit their songs all the time, but how often do they edit them?  I feel like the music happens and then some lyrics happen when I am ready...anyone else want to share their process?