Every song comes from some sort 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, characters, drama, beginning, middle and end.

But what if you’re a composer and you have a story that is too long….too complex to fit in the standard four minute song. Well then maybe you need to think about breaking it out to its constituent parts and telling the story across multiple songs. You do this over enough songs and you create a concept album. A record where a story or a variety of themes tie everything together front to back and back to front.
Your four-minute short story has turned into an hour-long novel.

This is part 2 of the history of the concept album in alt-rock.

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