What's the Story

Exploring the Spotify profiles of your friends isn’t just useful when assembling a party playlist or discovering hidden gems in their “recently played” log. Spotify can also tell us a lot about how music is consumed today. It isn’t hard to find playlists built around a particular mood, event, or state of mind—some examples I’ve come across include “Calm Down,” “twerk.,” and “I Just Had Sex Party.” Although many treat the concept of theme-based listening as a novel one (there are even entire websites like Songza devoted to this kind of thing), the truth is that artists started packaging their music thematically, in the form of the album, long before these recent developments. The difference with albums lies in their nuance in communicating complex emotions and events while still telling a story.

A look at some of the highest-grossing albums of all time shows that the story is an important component that goes into not only emotionally complex musical works but also successful ones.

The Classics

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles hit considered by critics to be one of the first concept LPs in modern music, uses a fictional ensemble and their show as a framework for connecting a widely varied “set,” including “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “When I’m Sixty-Four” and the closing rhapsody, “A Day in the Life.” Beyond the faux-band motif, “Sgt. Pepper’s” songs are linked by the uniqueness of their instrumentation (including brass and woodwinds), the use of related musical keys, and lyricism that captures the mood of successful community-building and generational disconnect that defined the psychedelic era.

“Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac uses “the breakup” as its frame. No doubt influenced by the band’s own personal tensions unfolding in 1976, the album shows both the optimistic and pessimistic side of heartbreak with the equally energetic “Don’t Stop” and “Go Your Own Way.” The line of B-side track “Oh Daddy”—“And I can't walk away from you, baby/If I tried”—conveys the sentiments of regret and reversal that, while deviating from idea of a breakup, fits naturally into the emotional and thematic progression of the album.

Today’s Hits

Coldplay’s “Mylo Xyloto” uses color (physically on the album cover itself and musically in terms of the work’s expansive and more electronic sound) to show love’s triumph over suppression. While songs like the acoustic-grounded “Us Against the World” and the simplistic “Up in Flames” don’t fit in squarely with the rest of the album’s driving, full sound, they do help the listener to understand the vulnerabilities that inevitably come with a love story.

Kayne’s “Yeezus” uses lyrical and stylistic elements to weave together a hard-hitting work that tells a story of a world whose people are confused and adrift. West combines heavy religious (Jesus in “I Am a God”), historical (apartheid in “Blood On The Leaves,” and sexual (“Bound 2”) imagery with a straightforward sound composed mostly of basic beats and synthesizer lines, creating a picture of extravagance over a sensation of nothingness. These contrasting features, combined with the abrupt changes and samplings of high-pitched melodies (“On Sight”) and ceremonial chants (“I Am a God”), help to transmit Kayne’s message of confusion and discomfort to his listener.

The “stories” of these hit records have a wide range of topic and complexity. They are neither Broadway-esque in the obviousness of their plots nor one-dimensional in their themes as the playlists of today’s Spotify libraries tend to be. Some of the stories are told lyrically, while others are told musically with unified melodies, motives, and modes across different types of songs. Regardless of their methods, though, musicians who produce successful albums are able to create a work that not only displays diversity of talent or style but also uses that diversity to tell a story in the same way an author uses sentences, chapters, and literary devices to craft a novel. If we trust authors to order their chapters correctly and we take the time to read their stories from start to finish, we should trust musicians in their album-making ability and take the time to hear their stories, too. Just as literature has the power to convey complex ideas to its readers through its characters, albums have the potential to unlock a full range of human emotions that singles and Spotify playlists can only begin to uncover.