Entry #8: Concept Albums

    Concept albums are my favorite kind of album, some of my favorites include The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, and more recently Clancy by twenty one pilots. The idea of a concept album is to tell a story or create a world that the songs live in and relate to. Each song builds lore and tells a story to convey a point or purpose. Some stories can be straight forward while others can be entirely subjective and up to the listener to decide the meaning. Both of the above mentioned albums have really deep stories and I am going to give a brief rundown on each one to show why I love this kind of writing.

    First, I will go over The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance. This album is a rock opera, it has fast heavy metal guitar tones mixed with slow piano ballads throughout, this mix gives the album a dark and gritty tone while also balancing it out with beauty and sorrow. The story being told is about “The Patient” who is a kid that is tragically dying of cancer. The lyrics are from the perspective of the patient, and this is seen most clearly in the title track of the album “Welcome to the Black Parade”. The song starts out with a simple piano melody and the patient starts telling the story of how his father took him to a parade when he was younger. The song then picks up with added guitars and drums that build to a climax and this climax is supposed to symbolize the moment that The Patient dies. The chorus of the song says “Though your dead and gone, your memory will carry on”, this is to drive the point home that that the patient is dead and that he will now only live on in the memories of his loved ones. To delve a little deeper the lead singer of the band, Gerard Way, has said that he believes death comes for you in your fondest memory, and if we apply that to this story death came for the patient in the form of a black parade because his fondest memory was of his father taking him to a parade. These themes of death persist throughout the album and every song builds upon how the patient deals with different things in his life. It overall has a sad but hopeful message that even though people move on from life they will live on in the memories of their loved ones. This album has always been a massive inspiration to me and I want to learn as much as I can from it as I think it’s a perfect concept album.

    The next album, “Clancy” by twenty one pilots, is less straight forward and is actually the end to a story that the band have been building throughout all of their albums. To try and keep this explanation on the short side I will tell you the story of “Clancy” then how it relates to the songs and larger message. Clancy is a citizen of a city called Dema which is within the continent of Trench, this city is controlled by 9 bishops who enforce a religion called Vialism. Vialism teaches that the only way to salvation is self-destruction, which in turn gives the bishops the ability to seize control of your body. Our protagonist Clancy is an escapee and ends up in a cycle where he escapes Dema then gets tracked down and brought back by the main antagonist Nico, who is the bishop that watches over Clancy. On Clancy’s journeys outside of Dema he comes across the native people of Trench who call themselves Banditos. The Banditos eventually come up with a plan to fight back against the bishops and the big showdown between Clancy and Nico is how the album ends. The last lines of the album are Clancy climbing the top of one of the towers in the city looking to confront Nico asking him to show himself, then you hear a door open and Nico presents himself and ends the album by saying “So few, so proud, so emotional, Hello Clancy.” Now, this whole story is a giant metaphor for the battles that the frontman of the band, Tyler Joseph, deals with in his mind. Twenty one pilots songs are clearly about dealing with anxiety, addiction, and depression. This is clear in many songs on Clancy for example, in the song “Backslide” he is talking about not wanting to slide back to where he started from. He is worried that all the progress he’s made in dealing with these human issues will be lost and that actually ends up being the case as in a later song “Snap Back” he says the line “It’s a backslide, I hate the surprise, and now it’s all gone all of that progress.” Cycles are a common theme in these songs and when you compare the cycle of Clancy escaping Dema only to keep getting caught by the bishops to the cycle of dealing with concepts like anxiety, addiction, and depression you can start to connect the dots of what the overall meaning of the story is. Despite the ominous and almost defeating ending of the album where it seems like Clancy is once again captured by Nico, in my opinion what the band is trying to convey is a sense of hope. Yes, Clancy was captured again representing that Tyler’s demons have caught up to him and brought him back to a dark place, but with the concept of a cycle there is hope that he will escape them again and get back to being better. It’s a long and complex way to say that even if things aren’t going well in life, if you keep going eventually you will be back to a better more hopeful place. 

    These stories that are being told through the medium of music mean a lot to me as a source of inspiration. In the future I hope to make something that has as much meaning as these albums.

The Black Parade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkCA2XqUJ4o&list=OLAK5uy_kf2mr4s7G3ErS-ruCXgDFFwY8HyHQijfA

Clancy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3OiQEOcrA8&list=PL3roRV3JHZzbatp5PvE-88ApmVishqGHN&index=1