Introducing "Prog Stories"

I want to be able to write "story songs." I tried a few times in the past, with dreadful results. But starting in the autumn of 2020 or thereabouts, I began to wonder whether I am not in fact able to make out the beginnings of a path behind all the tangled shrubbery...

I want to write long story songs. A few new sets of lyrics that I've drafted will, once set to music, probably be between 10 and 20 minutes apiece. My musical native ground (psychedelic folk foremost, shadowed by folk-rock, reggae-rock, gospel-folk...) doesn't have a lot of very long stories like that. And I'm talking about real stories, with a plot you can summarize (as in, "they had a meal at the inn, then went into a forest, and there they get lost, and each wanderer ended up in a different kingdom, and all of the kingdoms were at war," not "this tells of the dangers of complacency and of the struggle of the questing human soul") and maybe characters whose personalities you could make some concrete remarks about. There are a few Bob Dylan songs like that: The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, Black Diamond Bay, Tin Angel. Another big favorite is Jeffrey Lewis's On We Went, recorded with the incomparable Peter Stampfel for Come On Board, the first entry in their trilogy of collaborations. 

Big Big Train have a lot of fantastic vignettes along these lines, but I don't think any of their story songs get quite as convoluted as the Dylan or Lewis examples above, and one of the things I love so much about those songs is that you have to listen to them ten or fifteen times before you can piece the whole story together. I love the sense of swimming in a vast, teeming sea that early listens to such songs can bring. That sense of swimming, or drifting, is what I want my own songs to have, just on a larger (or, more accurately, longer) scale.

Most of the songs on Al Joshua's Anomalous Events achieve exactly this effect, come to think of it, and with remarkably short song lengths of three to six minutes. 

Some candidates, especially on the [concept] album scale, tend too far to the abstract or allegorical for what I have in mind; Leonard Cohen's Ballad of the Absent Mare, say, or Pink Floyd's The Wall. Roger Waters' Radio K.A.O.S. comes closer, but even there, you'll find (excellent) interludes, like Me or Him and Home, that don't do anything to advance the main story. Ian Anderson's Whatever Happened to Gerald Bostock? has characterization as rich as I could desire, and a web of complex, interlocking stories, but at heart it's more of a thought exercise than, in the words of Big Big Train legend David Longdon, a "ripping yarn" ... although it does end with what I currently believe to be the coolest plot twist in concept album history. Still, what I'm drawn to is a form that, in the world of song, would be what short stories are in the realm of prose fiction. There ought to be dialogue, probably, and maybe even phrases like "she said wonderingly" and "he answered disconsolately." The nitty-gritty.

Oh, there's The Decemberist's The Hazards of Love, which musically has a lot of things going for it, and which has characters with distinct personalities who talk to each other! But the storyline is thin.

Ah! And Sturgill Simpson's recent, remarkable The Ballad of Dood & Juanita. I don't think it has dialogue, but it meets the story and character requirements. A "ripping yarn" for sure. Ten songs, twenty-eight minutes, one story.

I was talking with my old friend Isaiah about all this, and he mentioned that progressive rock and progressive metal have tended to push further in the direction of large-scale storytelling than most rock or folk or related hybrids. My knowledge of the genre extends about as far as the foundational "soft prog" of Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, so I asked Isaiah for recommendations, and he sent me sixteen. They range from the "loose concept" in Pain of Salvation's One Hour by the Concrete Lake to Dream Theater's full-blown, 120-minute triple LP rock opera The Astonishing. 

I told Isaiah I would give at least six listens to each of the sixteen entities (fourteen actual albums, plus two albums' worth of selected long Dream Theater songs) and get back to him with my thoughts. When I finished exploring and writing up the first of the sixteen, with "brutal honesty" as the guiding principle, I liked the way it demonstrated just how much a stubbornly open-minded listener's thoughts about an album can change across six listens. If you're familiar with the music I'm writing about, you'll probably enjoy yelling at me in your head; but if you aren't, maybe these mini-dramas will be intriguing enough to turn you on to something nice, or else compel you to return to albums in your own listening history that you'd perhaps prematurely written off.

These installments of "Prog Stories" take the form of letters to "you," which is to say, my beloved friend Zaya the prog head.