Extra Extra - Concepts

our love of musical narratives

Dear musical reader,

Last week, while on a road trip to Dublin with my husband, I randomly selected a playlist of 1990s rock music to accompany the drive. It opened up a lot of conversation and reminiscences about the range of music we listened to in that decade (quite a variety), and the people we knew at the time. I’m not a nostalgic person. I don’t long for periods of my life that are over. In this way I am essentially practical: I am living this life in this moment. One day I will re-read this post and it will a snapshot of a moment and a person I no longer am.

But there is nothing that stirs up my memory quite like music.

I love being on long car journeys with my husband — there is something about sitting yet moving through the landscape while listening to music that provokes introspection and insights. For most trips now I don’t plan the music, but simply go with our humour. The only rule in our car is that the driver has the final say about the music, so if I’m at wheel, and do not enjoy the current jam, I can request another next track.

Previously (and this is not that long ago) you had to plan your musical accompaniment for car journeys. You were either stuck with cycling through radio stations or you had to pack a media player… or going back far enough, CDs, cassettes, etc. Today, we can drive and stream whatever music we fancy via my phone. There are endless opportunities.

While we were nodding our heads along to ‘big hair’ rock music, many tracks I had not listened to in well over a decade, we hit upon the a discussion of concept albums, and since then the concept of concept albums has been on my mind.

Euterpe, the muse of music, continues to inspire.

First off, you would think that since we are in the digital era that musicians would simply stop producing albums.¹ It’s a term that technically should be redundant since there’s no onus to produce physical media. Now, albums can be as long or as short as one likes (and the mini-album, the EP, remain a popular option). Yet musicians continue to want to create songs bundled around a loose theme. An album is a summary of a creative era. It represents the zeitgeist, your obsessions and influences, and what is affecting your life at that time. It is a type of creative exorcism, where you face those pestering earwigs, and banish them into bound forms. Then they are released into the world and you are freed from their haunting… until the next set of tunes begin to form in your mind.

This is similar to how authors create collections of short stories. There is the work and then there is the meta story-of-the-stories, the shape you give the volume by the order of their assembly (often done in conjunction with an editor).

Our addiction to narrative means that people yearn for a certain shape to a work, even to single pieces of music or stories. Albums come to represent a period in the listener’s life too. There are the albums you listened to during breakups, the ones that remind you of a period of travel, or what buoyed you up as an angsty teenager. While you are navigating issues in your life you can replay an album that brings you comfort and/or joy and the pattern of the songs encapsulates the range of your feelings.

Just look at the current mega-successful tour by Taylor Swift, which is called Eras, and features tracks from the first ten albums of her career. She has crafted another album of sorts, where her live concert curates her past work into a living representation of her creative life so far; during her three-hour performance Swift sings approximately 44 tracks. This connection between the artist and the listener can be profound and enduring.²

Which brings us to the concept album, which certainly does not need to exist anymore. Yet, I adore a good concept album.

A concept album is often an entire story told via a series of songs. When looking into its roots, I discovered that some put its genesis at Woody Guthrie's 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads, but surely the true inspiration comes from Opera and musical theatre, and even further back, since singing a narrative through songs is an ancient practice. In the past, epics were sung and accompanied by an instrument, often a lyre or a harp.

So the arrival of the concept album should not surprise anyone, and I am heartened that it endures as an artform. Have a look at the Wikipedia list, and notice how many albums are from post-2000.

I thought I would briefly discuss some concept albums I love, which are very much fixed to times in my life and places I lived. What are your favourites?

Jeff Wayne’s 1978 blockbuster album, The War of the Worlds, could be dismissed as a musical rock opera adaptation of the famous science fiction novel by H.G. Wells, but I think it influenced a generation a cemented an interest in the connection between science fiction and musical stories, which had been started by David Bowie’s 1972 loose concept album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.³ TWotW was a double-album, with gorgeous art, and featured spoken word narration by actor Richard Burton along with a variety of singers playing the main parts — including Irishman Phil Lynott. The symphonic gusto of the opening, with its use of synthesisers to create a sense of a weird and unearthly encounter is pretty hard to beat. It’s wee-oo sound that represents the Martian craft was an instant iconic sound, as is the ‘Ulla’ triumphant cry as they lay ruin to Earth.

This album arrived in my household via my older siblings, and it got a lot of play — you had to set and flip two records, twice, to hear the entire sequence. While I’m not a vinyl-head, I appreciate the tactile experience of listening to records in this fashion. There is a greater understanding of the creative heft of the album when you must literally hold it in your hands in order to experience it. It lends the music a sense of theatre and substance. You cannot stream seamlessly, you must get up and tend to it.

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973, and it would not be their only concept album, but I didn’t encounter it properly until I was studying for my first M.A. and I was living in a house with a friend who was a Floyd fan. I was familiar with their 1979 concept album, The Wall, but it simply didn’t hit with me deeply. I had other friends who were Floyd adherents, so I had listened to plenty of their music but my love of Floyd didn’t activate until I connected with DSotM.

I have a very clear memory of listening to it in the living room, surrounded by stacks of books and papers as I worked through one of the most intense rewriting/writing periods of my life. That thesis dominated my summer, and I was determined to finish it and submit it by the early September deadline. I didn’t really like DSotM after my first play through, but there was something about it that tickled at me. It was a sense that I had missed something. I also considered my mate’s love of the album, so I opted to listen to the entire album again. I began to settle into it. I listened to it a third time and it clicked.

It was a good lesson to me, as a twenty-year-old, that sometimes you had to give musics/writing/art a chance. It’s not always instant love. And perhaps the gradual appreciation is the better one. Would this story happen today in the era of Spotify and curated playlists?

I like to think it might.

The metal band Queensrÿche released Operation: Mindcrime back in 1988, but I didn’t encounter it until later. My friends in New York were mad about it, so it eventually crossed my radar. As someone who loved cyberpunk fiction and listened to heavy metal, it was an easy sell for me. It’s entirely formulaic, and has an over the top storyline of a person tricked into becoming an assassin for a mysterious agency, who eventually discovers that all is not what it seems. Throw in a doomed love affair, dark future nihilism, and a double-cross set to driving beats and soaring singing.

We listened to the entire album on the drive back from Dublin and I knew every single word and each melodic flair. Memories of my New York era, and the good friends who I made during that period, are conjured every time I hear this album. Two of my friends from this period have since passed away, one of them just last year, so there is a poignancy now to those memories.

Janelle Monáe’s 2007 album, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, was her debut extended play EP and heralded the rise of a phenomenal talent (it was followed up by another concept album, The ArchAndroid in 2010). I discovered it when I went on a Monáe deep dive after a friend asked me to accompany her to the musician’s concert in the Black Box in Galway — way before Monáe’s fame as an actress — and I was happy to oblige. I’m always open to discovering a new artist.

In this album Monáe assumes the character of Cindi Mayweather, an android in a futuristic city that’s heavily inspired by 1927 silent film Metropolis by Fritz Lang. The opening track is an announcement of Mayweather’s outcast status for falling in love with a human, and the start of a bounty hunt to track her down. The tracks detail the chase and the rise of Mayweather as a icon of revolution against a repressive regime. This is a fusion of funk, pop, soul and hip hop, which lends a sense of it being a soundtrack for a future place.

It’s back to the 1970s, and the 1973 album, The Táin by Irish rock/trad band, Horslips, which is based on the Irish mythological cycle, Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). It’s easy to take Horslips for granted in Ireland now, but when they came out, fusing traditional music forms with rock music instruments, they were musical pioneers, and at the forefront of advocating for a new vision of Ireland that wasn’t hidebound and nostalgic. The Irish trad scene at the time were appalled by their musical innovations, and they were very much part of the rise across the globe of fresh takes on folk music during that decade.

As someone who loves Irish mythology, I listen to this album regularly. Here, mythic heroes comes to life and fight, gods and goddesses rise and fall, all in beautifully crafted tracks. The opening guitar in ‘Dearg Doom’ (translated as ‘Red Destroyer’ referring to the hero, Cú Chulainn), is instantly recognisable to Irish listeners.

I’d also highly recommend the 1976 album, The Book of Invasions: A Celtic Symphony, by Horslips. It’s based on the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the premier Irish mythology cycle, that translates as The Book of Invasions. I may even like this album slightly more…

It’s clear from my short overview that the 1970s saw a particular flourishing of the concept album form, but I’m glad to see so many artists continue to work with it. I’ve only shown the tippety top of a gigantic iceberg — there are so many more amazing works I don’t have the space to highlight, and I’m sure many of you are shaking your heads at my obvious omissions. So, go off and listen to one of your favourites. Perhaps knock the dust off an album cover and slide the vinyl onto a player for enhanced appreciation.

‘Allegory of Spring and Summer’ by Bernardo Strozzi, 1581-1644.

As mentioned last week, I’m travelling to Barcelona on Thursday for jury duty at the Sitges Film Festival (Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya), so expect a small travelogue next week. I’ll be immersed in speculative films and trying not to melt in the Spanish October Sun, which is as hot as what we might get for a couple of weeks during the summer in Ireland!

I’ll also be moderating a conversation between Kyra Elise Gardner (director of Living with Chucky) and Katharina Kubrick (actress and art director) on ‘Exploring the Fantasy Legacy’ on Friday — so I’m looking forward to that!

1. Yes, I’m aware that while musicians continue to produce albums, many people don’t buy the entire album, but only buy (or stream) the tracks they enjoy the most.

2. Taylor’s tenth album, Midnights, is also a concept album,

3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show came out in 1973 as a musical, and then as a film in 1975, so it was also an influence, but not a ‘concept album’ per se.