Joe to band: More album, less concept

 2000 Years to Christmas

No, that’s a terrible idea. What the hell! Sometimes I wonder about your synaptic circuits, dude. I’m starting to think your think-o-lator needs urgent service. What else have you got? I got nothing.

Oh, hey, out there in cyber land. Just another day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home in upstate New York. And by “another day,” I mean another contentious debate over the best way forward for your friends in Big Green. As you know, rock bands spend a lot of their time working out their artistic direction over the course of ten, sometimes twenty years. Hell, if you don’t do THAT, you might end up drifting … or playing the same stuff over and over again …. which is, uh, kind of what …. we …. do ….

An extraordinary meeting

Well, we’re trying to get away from that sort of thing. That’s why we’ve convened a special meeting of the Big Green creative steering committee, which is comprised of the band members, of course, plus Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man-sized tuber. We used to include Anti-Lincoln in these meetings, but he kept talking about the war and, well, that gets old pretty fast.

Still, even without “A-Link”, as we call him, in attendance, we some time end up treading the same territory. For instance, we were on the topic of concept albums. I asked the group to suggest some possible concepts for upcoming Big Green collections. Most of the man-sized tuber’s suggestions were plant-based, but then Marvin piped up with the suggestion that we do an album themed around the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. I’m telling you, it’s A-Link all over again!

Can we leave Prince Leopold out of this, Marvin?

Why all Marvin’s ideas are bad ones

Okay, putting Lincoln aside for a moment, there are about a hundred reasons why doing a concept album about the Franco-Prussian War is a bad idea. First of all, I’m convinced that a not-insignificant portion of our fan-base is still sensitive about the accession of Prussian Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen to the Spanish throne. And while I don’t want to seem like a panderer, in these hard economic times, we shouldn’t go out of our way to alienate anyone unnecessarily.

This tends to be the problem with many if not all of Marvin’s ideas. There’s always a poison pill hidden in there somewhere. Honestly, a concept album about the Franco-Prussian War would inevitably dredge up unpleasant memories of the birth of France’s Third Republic, and THEN where would we be? That’s why all of Marvin’s ideas are bad!

The totally excellent solution

How about this? No more concept albums. From now on, Big Green albums will just be a collection of randomly generated songs with no relationship to one another or to some unifying idea. Thoughts? Any hands? (Or branches, tubey?)

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