Concept album: Encyclopedia - Concept album

Concept album

Usually, in popular music, an artist or group releases an album consisting of a number of unconnected songs that the members of the group or the artist have written, or have chosen to cover. In a concept album, on the other hand, all songs contribute to a single overall theme or unified story. Given that the suggestion of something as vague as an overall mood often tags a work as being a concept album, a precise definition of the term proves highly problematic.

What could very loosely be considered the first concept albums were released in the late 1930s by singer Lee Wiley on the Liberty Records label, featuring eight songs on four 78s by great showtunes composers of the day, such as Harold Arlen and Cole Porter, anticipating more comprehensive efforts by Verve Records impresario Norman Granz with Ella Fitzgerald by almost two decades. In folk music, Woody Guthrie's 1940 debut album Dust Bowl Ballads is also an early possibility.

Frank Sinatra, both with early albums originally released as 78s for Columbia Records such as The Voice from 1945, and continuing through his thematically programmed albums of the 1950s for Capitol Records starting with the ten-inch 33s Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy, is generally credited with both popularizing and developing the concept album, and it was at this time that the specific term was first used. Perhaps the first full Sinatra concept album example is In the Wee Small Hours from 1955, where the songs – all ballads – were specifically recorded for the album, and organized around a central mood of late-night isolation and aching lost love, and the album cover strikingly reinforced that theme.

However, notion of a concept album did not really gel at that point, and was not widely imitated, aside from occasional examples such as country singer Marty Robbins' Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs from 1959, or, as the first example from rock, Little Deuce Coupe from 1963 by The Beach Boys, each of whose 12 songs were about America's car culture.

In 1966, several rock releases were arguably concept albums, and in any case started other rock artists thinking: Pet Sounds, again by the Beach Boys, a masterful musical portrayal of Brian Wilson's would-be state of mind (and a huge inspiration to Paul McCartney); the Mothers of Invention's sardonic farce about rock music and America as a whole, Freak Out!; and Face to Face by The Kinks, the first collection of Ray Davies's idiosyncratic character studies of ordinary people. However, none of these attracted a wide commercial audience.

This all changed with The Beatles' celebrated 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. With this release, the notion of the concept album came to the forefront of the popular and critical mind, with the earlier prototypes and examples from classic pop and other genres sometimes forgotten.

In fact, as pointed out by many critics since its original reception, Sgt. Pepper is a concept album only by some definitions of the term. There was, at some stage during the making of the album an attempt to relate the material to an obscure radio play about the life of an ex-army bandsman and his shortcomings but this conceptwas lost in the final production. On it, the Beatles supposedly adopt fictionalized personae, and the title song, styled as the theme song of the fictional "Lonely Hearts Club Band", wraps around the rest of the album like bookends. However, most of the songs on the album are narratively unrelated to the theme, and the fictional characters have little life beyond the introduction of Ringo Starr as "Billy Shears" in the segue between the first two tracks. On the other hand, the slice-of-life character miniatures and short story structure of many of the songs, especially those penned by Paul McCartney, echo elements commonly found in other thematic works such as musicals and opera. This feeling was reinforced by the album's use of cuts run together or linked with transitions. Even more striking was the album's opulent cover, packaged inserts, and full lyrics printed on the back, all of which suggested a unified work more than just a collection of songs. In any case, while debate exists over the extent to which Sgt. Pepper qualifies as a true concept album, there is no doubt that its reputation as such helped inspire other artists to produce concept albums of their own, and inspired the public to anticipate them.

In the wake of the Sgt. Pepper triumph, concept albums became the rage among serious rock artists, with mixed results. The Rolling Stones attempted to duplicate Sgt. Pepper with more explicitly drug and occult-inspired overtones with Their Satanic Majesties Request, but it proved to be a commercial and artistic failure, one that the 'Stones quickly learned from and moved on.

The groundbreaking LP S.F. Sorrow (1968) by British R&B group The Pretty Things is now generally considered to be one of the first successful rock concept albums, in that each song is part of an overarching unified concept -- the life story of the main character, Sebastian Sorrow. Despite its dazzling production and strong material, and although it received almost unanimously glowing reviews on release, the LP was not a major success and its importance and influence has often been underrated.

Drawing heavily on the Pretty Things LP, it was Pete Townshend and The Who that took the idea of thematically based albums to its most successful and satisfying conclusion, with the groundbreaking "rock opera" Tommy, its aborted successor Lifehouse, and their final rock opera Quadrophenia.

Another work that could be considered as an early example of the rock opera-type of concept album is Days of Future Passed (1967) by the Moody Blues, which combines the acoustic instrumentation of the group with the orchestral interludes of the London Festival Orchestra to document a typical "everyman's day".

Concept albums are especially common in the progressive rock genre of the 1970s, although rarely did that equal a lasting commercial or critical legacy for the band or artist involved. Most notably, Pink Floyd recast itself from its 1960s guise as a quirky, intermittently successful psychedelic band into a cash-generating monster with its classic series of concept albums, beginning with Dark Side of the Moon from 1973. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull wrote a number of successful concept albums, notably "Thick as A Brick" which was long song about 40 minutes in length and which included material intended to "spoof" the concept album genre. But in the mid to late 1970's, concept albums grew to be plagued by the suffocating nature of ever more pretentious, self-conscious themes. These themes tended to drive the songwriters, and the quality of the individual songs suffered. A prime example of this was Styx' overblown and unintentionally humorous 1983 album Kilroy Was Here, a late and poorly received entry into the genre that effectively marked the end of the 1970's-style theatrical rock operas. (although Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime was able to find critical and commercial success.)

Within the progressive metal genre, Dream Theater ended the 20th Century with Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory in 1999. This concept album was a sequel to their original song from their 1993 album Images and Words, about a present day man's nightmares of his death in his previous life in 1928.

In the intervening decades, concept albums have often been out of vogue, but Radiohead duplicated that kind of acceptance both from the critics and in the marketplace with OK Computer from 1997, and the related Kid A and Amnesiac albums of 2000 and 2001. The Mars Volta have created two highly complex concept albums. The first of which, De-Loused in the Comatorium, chronicles the morphine-induced coma of the character Cerpin Taxt.

Since the 1980s, concept albums have been frequent in the power metal and epic metal genres. One of the most notable power metal bands to use the concept ablum is Kamelot. Kamelot's last two releases, Epica and The Black Halo, are two parts of a tale following the protagonist Ariel and his interations with the many different forms and experiences with the evil Mephisto. The two album story is based on Goethe's Faust.

Perhaps the first R&B concept album is TP.3 Reloaded,by R. Kelly released in 2005, which features 5 chapters of the "Trapped...in the Closet" soap opera. The album received a great deal of press for being ground breaking in the R&B genre. Kelly subsequently released a Trapped...in the Closet DVD of music videos containing chapters 1-12, completing the rambling tale of unfaithful lovers.

An example for a Techno concept album is Metropolis by Jeff Mills (2001), yet another alternative score for the movie of the same name.

An emerging subset is the historical album, which is more closely tied with specific historically accurate references to persons or places.

An ambitious extension of the concept album idea could be realized in a series of albums which all contribute to a single effect or unified story. Contemporary examples include Coheed and Cambria's in-progress tetralogy of records and mind.in.a.box's Lost Alone and Dreamweb albums which describe an on-going sci-fi themed story in a Matrix-like universe. Arguably the most ambitious of these is Sufjan Stevens' Fifty-States project, in which he plans to write a series of albums encompassing the concept of the entire United States of America, one for each state, totalling fifty records.

The concept album genre overlaps with rock opera, of which the most famous early example is The Who's aforementioned Tommy (1969). Like Sgt. Pepper, Tommy greatly boosted the visibility of the concept album idea, and the genre also overlaps to a lesser extent with rock musical, of which the most famous early example is Hair (1967).

See also

• List of concept albums
• Program music – the classical music analogue

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