Turn Off Shuffle:
Concept Albums Explained
by Paul-Newell Reaves
The Beekeeper
Tori Amos
2004
Each song on the album is a bee.
Each one of these song-bees pollinates one of six gardens: “the orchard”, “the greenhouse”, “rock garden”, “desert garden”, “roses and thorns” and “herbs and elixirs”.
There is no other unifying concept to Tori Amos’ album The Beekeeper. The songs are otherwise unrelated, there are no recurring characters or topical catch-alls, and no narratives at all.
Yet, as Amos weaves her eloquent themes, sparkling images and substantial profundities across this collection of songs, a new and remarkable literary experience blooms from out the furrows.
My fundamental object in these Concept Albums Explained articles is to show how music lyrics function as literature under the scrutiny of close reading, and how the concept album functions as the long form of this mode of literature.
As the song-bees of this album buzz around the listener/ reader, Amos creates a mode of experiencing High Literature that never existed prior in written history.
How does one experience her new form?
Song-bees will bumble, so the random shuffle function of digital playback must be turned on. This random experience of reading lyrics in itself is nothing new, CD players have had a shuffle option since the late 1980s. Certain literarily-minded albums orient well to this type of reading— such as Talib Quali and Mos Def’s Blackstar. Insert disk, press play— their “Intro” track demands to initiate the experience— engage the shuffle function, and the remaining songs will appear as their orbits align.
Yet Amos’ album insists on an order within the randomness of the shuffle function. With no firm tracklist, she orders the songs into thematic gardens— each song-bee has a natural habitat.
So— even as her overarching themes of loss and trauma, femininity and motherhood, and a longing for geographical escape intwine across the entirety of the album— these song-bees remain in their own distinct gardens, along with their own distinct themes.
To experience this concept album in full glory, one must make a playlist for each of the five gardens.
The Beekeeper was released in 2004. By this time, listeners could create MP3 playlists— disregarding the artist’s designated tracklist, and therefore the artists’ intent. Mostly used to combine songs by different artists across many albums, this mode of listening goes back even further than the shuffle function— known as mix-tapes on a cassette. But mix-tapes cannot be randomized.
When these two modes of listening are combined, however— shuffle and playlist— then applied to a single album of literarily-minded lyrics— and have no doubt, Amos is atop the tree of her abilities, here— a new mode of reading long form literature develops.
Surprisingly, this new mode of reading gives the listener/ reader a surprising amount of deliberate agency in the literary experience, entrenched within the randomness of the beginning, middle and the end. One can choose which gardens to visit in any sequence— may choose what theme to explore in whatever order. The reader/ listener may wander from garden to garden, allowing the song-bees to appear as they will.
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