I make a big song and dance about how good stories can be found anywhere. Well, it's time to put my money where my mouth is and put my first ever music album under the magnifying glass. And what better way to start than with one of my favourite bands, Muse, and their conceptual album, Drones.
Music faces a unique challenge when it comes to telling a story, in that it's not the main purpose of the medium. Movies and books tell stories. Music is...well, what is music for? It's entertainment, sure, but isn't there more to it than that? For me, music serves to create or enhance a mood. Music can relax, excite, enrage, make you smile, make you cry. And it can do that even when you were feeling in a completely different mood prior to listening. It's also the only form of entertainment that doesn't require your complete attention: you can leave the music to play while you cook, exercise, chat or even sleep. So how do you match this format of entertainment with telling a story? It's a challenge, to be sure, hence why those “albums that tell a story” are rare compared to your straight-shooting one-track-at-time album. And even then, conceptual albums can be very hit or miss, often failing for not committing to its story enough or too much (when there's filler tracks to simply move the story along). Sure, you get songs that tell a whole story in one go (Eminem’s ‘Stan’ is a prime example), but sustaining the narrative across a dozen tracks is a very different beast. People rarely come to music for the story it tells: they come it for those reasons I mentioned earlier; for setting a mood or for background entertainment. So it’s a real challenge for the more narrative-inclined songwriters out there. There’s multiple methods and techniques out there, but for me there there’s two main points that a good story-based album need to demonstrate: the stealth story, and the feel of the story arc. And I feel that Muse’s Drones displays both expertly. Let’s cover the stealth story first. How many times have you been told that the song you’ve enjoyed listening to hundreds of times has an interesting story to it, and you never noticed it? Well, in a backwards kind of way, that's the ideal. You see, you don’t feel short-changed from your entertainment: you have been enjoying the music on a different level. If anything, sometimes knowing what the lyrics really mean can spoil the music for some. Not because the narrative is distasteful, but because you can’t not hear the story when you’ve first noticed it. People prefer their music to complement their lifestyle, as a form of escapism that doesn’t intrude, while stories push a specific agenda that demands attention and a certain thought process from the listener. That can put off listeners who just like their music to be something that makes their commute a little more enjoyable or something to unwind with at the end of the day. It’s why people understandably raise their hackles whenever an album strips away all the music for a bit of tuneless narration. A good story can enhance the music in the same way that a good soundtrack enhances a movie, but it should never overpower it. The story should be inserted stealthily, threaded seamlessly into the fabric of the sound. Lyrics are deliberately opaque, painting the underlying narrative in broad strokes without filling in the detail. If the lyrics explicitly spell out what is happening, it sticks out and can irritate those who simply wish to enjoy the music. Look to songs like Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz, with lyrics and accompanying video signalling the dangers of excess and the loss of innocence, but you need not know that. You can take it on a surface level. This isn’t to say that listeners don’t wish to be challenged. Rather, they prefer to make up their own mind up about what the music means to them. That’s why the best concept albums are often interpreted in different ways: the meaning was never clearly laid out. We get a general feel for the themes and the vague direction the story takes, but the finer points are left to the audience to fill in - if they want to. Coming back to Muse’s Drones, I think all listeners can agree that the album has an anti-military, anti-authority stance, and there seems to be a character who falls into the system, becoming a drone, before breaking free of their oppressor. But beyond that, the detail of the story is unclear, at times contradictory. The band has said that the protagonist is female, yet there’s evidence in the album to the contrary, such as the male screams of ‘aye Sir!’ on Psycho. Psycho itself paints a picture of military-style mental abuse, but other songs like Mercy (and the accompanying video) allude to a more scientific theme of mind control. Some have said that this is a downside, that the concept is unclear. On the contrary, this is the greatest sign of a story that’s been stealthily inserted into the music: it’s up for interpretation. After listening to Drones from beginning to end we all get a rough sense of the story told, while having individual elbow room to fill in the blanks. Personally, I latch onto the opening lines in Mercy, where we have lines like: “I tried to change the game/I tried to infiltrate but now I’m losing.” So for me the protagonist was some kind of double agent who is failing to stay true to themselves. The 10-minute epic of The Globalist seems to me to be the protagonist coming face to face with the big bad guy (whoever he is), who decides to detonate and flatten the entire world before he dies, leaving our protagonist and his/her love interest as the only humans left. If you have listened to Drones, you likely have your own interpretation, and that’s fine, but there’s a good chance it’s not far off of what I got out of it. We might differ on the small points but the general spine of the story is agreed upon. Which, if you were to simply print off the lyrics for each song and read them out without any of the music, is actually pretty incredible: Drones leans heavily on those obtuse lyrics I mentioned earlier. And this is where we get the second key technique of storytelling in a concept album: making the mood. The story of a conceptual album doesn’t just exist through the words, but also through the music. The feel, the tone, the way the words are presented, all serve to gently build the theatre in the mind of the listener, and inform the way they should feel while they listen. This is one of music’s greatest strengths, why some movies would simply feel wrong if they had no soundtrack. Seriously, can you imagine Return of the King’s famous beacon firelighting scene without the music? It wouldn’t work because the music swells with the feel of Gandalf’s words: “Hope is kindled.” Hope is carried through the air on the back of elated strings and a stirring brass section. Music is excellent at pulling at the heartstrings, and is surprisingly effective at inspiring a certain mood in the audience. This is what Drones does so well. The feel of each song conjures certain images in the mind. So where the lyrics may only hint at what is happening in the story, the music itself helps to frame what is happening through the atmosphere of the sound. This is what Drones does so well, and is the reason why so many get the feel for a story without it feeling as though it intrudes on the music. Rather, the story is told through the music. Dead Inside feels robotic, claustrophobic. Psycho is aggressive and abusive. Mercy, with its tinkling piano, gives the album’s first hint of human emotion, of softness. Reapers is wild and full of panic. The Handler is heavy and leaden, as though...yep, oppressed - until that wail of “LET ME GO!”. Defector is at turns euphoric and seething with sweet revenge. And so on. The music echoes the beats of the story itself, and it follows a classic story arc of trigger, quest, climax and resolution. So the story lives through the music, not in spite of it. Each track can conjure a mood which, when played one after the other, stacks up into a kaleidoscope of moods and captured emotions that echo that of a story. If this is combined with the stealth story, then you are coming close to finding what all the best conceptual albums share: music that can be enjoyed on a surface level, but with hidden depths for the more perceptive listener to delve into if they wish. But the music must always come first. I know I’ve repeated ad nauseum how the story comes second on music albums, but let’s be real here: when we have a movie we enjoy, how many times are we going to rewatch it in, say, a year? Twice, maybe three times? Now, how about an album you enjoy? You’re going to replay it at least twenty times or more. No matter how good a story is, it’s going to lose it’s shine after a couple of playthroughs, whereas music is much more durable when it comes to replayability. Being overly pushy on the story front on an album is going to dramatically affect its shelf life, no matter how good that story may be. It can be a tricky balance for music to tell a story, primarily because of the listener’s preconceptions about what music should be. But when the balance is struck, and I believe Drones is a perfect example of this, we get albums that transcend into something else: piece of entertainment that works on multiple levels. Don’t underestimate how much of achievement that is!
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Off the ShelfHere I share my ideas, musings and advice on the writing process. I also analyse some of my own writing for examples to show how I work. ShowcaseHere I will show off of some of my favorite good and great stories, gushing lovingly over why I adore them and why you should too. I will also show you the other side of the spectrum: bad examples of stories and what we can learn from them.
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