Who Reads the Liner Notes?
The gatefold was a room you could enter. A defense of the words printed alongside the music.
Liner notes were the first thing to vanish when music went weightless, and almost no one noticed. But they were never filler. They were the album explaining itself in its own voice.
To read them is to be let in — to learn who played the second horn, who wrote the string arrangement, and who the record was quietly dedicated to.