Eric Wolfson on the history of the concept album
It’s possible that (almost) no one has attempted a major history of the concept album because it’s a prohibitively sprawling and amorphous category.
I’ve written about Eric Wolfson before, I’ll probably write about him every time he publishes a book, because he’s one of my favorite people to talk to about music. We chatted quite a bit about his new book as he was writing it, which is to say that I can’t claim any real journalistic distance but this is my newsletter and I’ll do what I want to!
In any case, Scott Sandage, the man who started Wolfson on this journey, sums the book up pretty well: “His ear for sound, way with words, and talent as a storyteller makes this book not only an insightful meditation on the concept album but also a gripping history of the times.”
Eric Wolfson loves albums, everything about them. He loves vinyl records, “12 tracks, a runtime of 42 minutes, whatever.” He really loves concept albums.
“Some of the best music is early concept album stuff, and stuff that’s on the verge of [being] concept albums,” he tells me in a phone conversation from his home in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife and three young children. We’re talking Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads and Sinatra’s themed albums (In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!) Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige, records tied together with a mood or idea, collections of songs that took the listener somewhere.
The topic of Wolfson’s new book, Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From the Beatles to Beyonce — the first published history of the concept album — is something he’s been thinking about for a long time.
As an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Wolfson took cultural historian Scott Sandage’s inaugural Roots of Rock and Roll class (which Sandage still teaches nearly two decades later). The final assignment was to make a mixtape (“That was still barely a thing,” Wolfson says) spanning five decades, with the songs joined by some kind of theme. Wolfson received a Bachelor of the Humanities and Arts in 2-D visual art and American history, a pursuit that was perhaps most obviously synthesized in his portraits of American presidents. His obsession with our country’s messy history persists, especially as expressed via the ephemera of American music.
Then, as now, Wolfson was interested in “rambling,” the “wandering-around type thing,” the itinerant nature of early blues and roots artists. And as he assembled his mixtape he noticed a progression from external to internal journeying. And there, in the middle of all these pre-rock blues and folk artists, and the Elvis generation, and the counterculture baby boomers, was the concept album. “As opposed to a journey that you take through one Beatles song or one Bob Dylan song,” he became fixated on the idea of, he says, “a whole album completely devoted to that idea of music as a journey, music as a trip.”
Wolfson thought it could make a good final thesis. Michael Witmore—then Wolfson’s advisor, now director of the Folgers Shakespeare Library —saw the beginnings of a book. Naturally, he told Wolfson, you’ll want to start with Pet Sounds.
Pet Sounds, it turns out, represents one of the project’s most vexing questions: Where’s the line between a true concept album and a record that’s just kinda concepty?
In 1967 Paul McCartney paid a visit to Brian Wilson. Wilson, on the heels of Pet Sounds, was writing his “teenage symphony to God,” SMiLE. The Beatles were just about to release Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The Beatles had recently retired from playing live, and Sgt. Pepper became an avatar for a band now confined to the studio. McCartney had San Francisco and counterculture on the brain. John Lennon noted a more surface-level trend in band names: “...people were no longer the Beatles or the Crickets—they were suddenly Fred and his Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes.”
Wolfson writes that the band “took the spirit of the medicine show and remade it into a psychedelic happening.” By choosing the rambling name, they “beat the competition by joining it, embracing any deceit implicit in the American music scene by reinventing themselves with a fake name.” The music, the cover art, the concept of the concept itself: it was rock music as high art.
As Wolfson defines it in the book’s introduction, “a concept album is an album that takes you on a journey by virtue of its unifying mood, theme, narrative, and/or underlying idea.” And ultimately it comes down to intention. With Pet Sounds, “my frustration …was that I heard [a singular] boy-meets-girl narrative run pretty strongly throughout,” he told me later via text. “But every bit of research indicated that Brian (& lyricist Tony Asher) wrote each song to be its own mood, not one overarching narrative.” Wilson’s true concept album was SMiLE.
McCartney, during his visit, played “She’s Leaving Home” on Wilson’s piano. McCartney’s song, to Wilson’s ears, made his own music sound “tentative and incomplete.” As he was leaving, McCartney offered a friendly competitive challenge: “You’d better hurry up!” Wilson wouldn’t finish SMiLE for another 37 years.
Sgt. Pepper became, in Wolfson’s words, the “first major rock album grounded in a conceptual structure that went beyond a mere collection of pop songs and [the first] to be recognized as such.” It, rather than Pet Sounds, is the book’s launchpad and north star.
Wolfson’s previous Bloomsbury publication was an entry into the 33 ⅓ collection, a history of From Elvis in Memphis. Every volume in that series follows the same basic format, analyzing one track per chapter. Each entry in Fifty Years of the Concept Album acts as a kind of mini 33 1/3 book, going track by track within a single chapter to create a cohesive portrait of each record.
It’s possible that the reason (almost) no one else has attempted a major1 history of the concept album is that it’s a prohibitively sprawling and amorphous category. In the early stages of the book Wolfson sent me dozens of potential outlines. Some started in the '50s or earlier and ended with the Beatles, or with Pink Floyd. Some included a wider range of genres. A Love Supreme, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and Marcus Garvey were initially considered and then cut in order to narrow the impossibly wide scope presented by the inclusion of jazz, country and reggae.
A few outlines were organized thematically: “the proto-concept album,” “the singer-songwriter concept album,” “the counter-countercultural concept album.” In the end, Wolfson decided to limit the scope to rock, pop, soul and hip hop. He arranged the records chronologically, starting with Sgt. Pepper and extending the timeline through Beyonce’s Lemonade.
Most of the 25 records featured in his book—among them Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For The Money, Green Day’s rock opera American Idiot, Kendrick Lamar’s cinematic coming-of-age story good kid MAAD city, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising—easily met Wolfson’s criteria. A few were slipperier. Sorting out Liz Phair’s track-by-track response to Exile on Mainstreet, for example, is nothing if not a Herculean task.
Wolfson wrote a whole chapter about Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska but was unable to ignore, among other things, the fact that the Boss himself has said he doesn’t “do” concept albums. It was scrapped it in favor of Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade.
“I think of Hotel California as a lightweight concept album. Or even Desperado in that there’s sort of a loose theme,” Wolfson says. “But I was purposefully trying to avoid albums like that. Cause otherwise you get fooled.
“There’s that Mitch Hedberg joke that's like, ‘any book is a kids’ book if the kid can read.’ And that’s how I feel about concept albums. Any album is a concept album if you bring a concept to it, basically.”
Fifty Years of the Concept Album is more about connecting threads than painting a complete picture. “I try to stress that,” Wolfson says. “ These aren’t necessarily the best albums or the most influential, they’re 25 from over 50 years and are in conversation with each other.”
The dialogue between Sgt. Pepper and SMiLE persists, a push and pull between real and alternate histories. As the Beatles set a new bar for rock music, Brian Wilson, caught in a worsening mental health crisis, was making something that felt like, he said, “putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a wall instead of a tabletop.”
“Even before SMiLE was completed, Sgt Pepper was seen as its rival,” Wolfson writes, “the two albums creating an equilibrium that the rest of the 1960 orbited around.” Had SMiLE been released as intended, six months before Sgt. Pepper, Wolfson believes “it would have changed the entire trajectory of rock and roll history by being rock’s first major concept album, cementing the Beach Boys among the most innovative and influential artists in rock history.”
When SMiLE was finally released in 2004 an interviewer asked Wilson how it became a “fully-fledged concept album.” Wilson answered that it had just popped into his brain. “Just a case of getting it done."
Like the sample-heavy 3 Feet High and Rising—a record that helped hip-hop save the concept album from irrelevancy—SMiLE is a kind of collage, high art pieced together from scraps. “The music of SMiLE is a melting pot of American musical styles – rock, pop standards, country music, folk ballads, doo-wop, sea shanties, schmaltz, touches of classical and jazz here and there,” Wolfson writes. Over the phone he quips, “It’s like if Wes Anderson tried to make a John Ford movie.”
Wolfson is perhaps a bit biased towards the Beatles' American counterparts. As Anglo-dominant as any history of the concept album must inevitably be, his first love will always be Americana. Every path he follows somewhere routes back into the history of American music.
Regardless, faced with the cold hard reality of both records, it’s hard to argue that Sgt. Pepper is a better or more artistically successfully concept album than SMiLE. “With the Beatles it was like ‘Oh we can do this [at the beginning and] again at the end’ and [there were] these happy accidents that they went with. And that’s why half the Beatles—John and Ringo—were like, well, this isn’t really a concept album. Its just the beginning and the end, and then the middle is all this random stuff.”
“That said, i do think that SMiLE is a better album,” Wolfson says.
“Or like,” he says, backing up half a step, “the Platonic SMiLE ideal that we have somewhere out there in the ether. Because there was so much more tension.”
The advent of streaming has inspired a lot of handwringing over the supposed demise of the album—12 songs, 42 minute runtime, whatever—though some might argue that its death is somewhat exaggerated. Both Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar cited their love of the full album as inherent to how they approached their own concept albums. Recently Billie Eilish announced that her new record, Hit Me Hard and Soft, is meant to be listened to all the way through. That no one seemed terribly impressed by that would suggest that listeners and artists still understand the record as a long-form medium. Critic Neil McCormick complained of Lana Del Rey’s thematic repetition on Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd: “In summary: dating, f---ing, shopping and death, to be more succinct than Del Rey herself is inclined to be.” Personally, I’d call that a conceptual through-line.
But as we know, a conceptual through-line does not (necessarily) a concept album make. Artists like Beyonce and Kendrick are old enough to have grown up with the concept album format, and Wolfson questions how the concept album will fare as artists and consumers grow up with less and less physical media.
But artists will always want to make a statement, and it’s easier to do that across an entire LP than in one song. “Even with Spotify,” Wolfson says, ‘the album is sort of the set thing. It’s the painting. There’s always going to be an audience for a good album that is unified in some way.”
It takes some digging to find, but in 2015 a guy named Gareth Shute self-published a book called Concept Albums. Wolfson’s is the first released by a major publishing house.