Supertramp - Breakfast in America (13/10/19)

I somewhat casually threw out the idea that all albums are concept albums, and i think i need to flesh out what i'm really talking about. I'll use a record from my own collection (obviously i'm slowly adding all of these albums to "my" collection, but i assume you know the difference).

The phrase "concept album" is popularly used to describe an album that intentionally tells a story or grapples with a main theme; like a novel, or an explicit series of paintings, or a film. I argue that every album has a concept, but that concept isn't necessarily the title, or artwork, or even the songs. The concept is what created the album in the first place, the collective idea that changed the internal desire to make and record music into a real physical object. All of my reviews have tried to get at that underlying concept in some way.

The most basic and boring is obviously "here are some songs we recorded recently." Next would be live albums that try to capture a moment in time, showcase the living band at what we think is their peak, or are themselves an intended spectacle. Quite often, we don't connect with this concept; we don't "get it" because it is too wrapped up in real life.

Sometimes, the album you thought you were making turns out to be completely different, and tells a much more complicated story. I think that's what happened with Thriller and the band Fever Tree.

The original concept for Supertramp's Breakfast in America was the diametrically opposed life philosophies of Rick Davies and Roger Hodgeson, but it morphed into their common concepts of what is and is not fun. Home life is not fun, but touring around foreign countries playing music sure is. They didn't plan it, the making of the album did it all on its own. That same magical melding of coincidences is what i try to aim for whenever i motivate myself to make another album.

Lots of people confuse this album for an American satire, which it certainly is not. The caricature of the u.s. that we receive isn't about us at all. It's the notion of going off on an adventure to a place we only know about in our imagination, and it's no different than CCR, or The Band, or George Harrison's excursions to India, or Mayall's version of LA.

Through the magic of making music, the limited intentions of two songwriters evolved into a much bigger, magical experience. It's also what made the publishing of Seals & Crofts I & II so fascinating (a humorous review if i do say so myself). It's what makes Breakfast in America an eternally great album (and Thriller too, in spite of my hating it).

I love it when you guys throw in your two cents, and i more than invite you to scour through my reviews, read them all in various out of order ways if you have the time and energy, and say whatever crazy thing comes to your mind. If nothing else, i hope at least one of these crazy-person essays inspires you to carve out an hour to really sit down and listen to what i consider the greatest human achievement of the 20th century: the album.

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