Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

Every song comes from some kind of story.

Sometimes it's just the story of a feeling, good or bad, or maybe it's just a way of getting a point of view across.

Other songs are actual stories. They have a narrative

and characters and drama and a beginning, middle, and end. It's like a short story that's

sung instead of written down in a book. But what if you're a composer, and you have a story that's

too long and too complex to fit inside a standard four-minute song? Well, then you have to start

thinking about breaking up the story into its constituent parts

and maybe spreading things out over multiple songs.

Do this over enough songs and you've created a concept album, a record where the story or

a series of themes link everything together back to front and front to back.

Your four-minute musical short story

has grown into an hour-long musical novel. Concept albums were big business in the late

1960s and 1970s. Prague rock bands were all over them, and the more complex, the better. I mean,

just look at Russia's 1976 album, 2112. We've got the Red Star of the Solar

Federation and the priests who run the temples of Syrinx and their

command over existence, and then we have the rebel guitar player

who rises up and then commits suicide. This whole thing was

inspired by Ayn Rand, the objectivist philosopher, who wrote

books like Atlas Sh shrugged.

Heavy stuff.

A little too heavy, actually.

...