‘Hello Earth/Morning Fog’ – Kate Bush

There’s a good case to be made that anything from the back half of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love belongs on a list like this. Titled The Ninth Wave, the entire second act of the record is practically one big theatrical piece, and letting go of any one part of the story feels almost treasonous. But if two sections should definitely be spun together, it’s hearing how the story finally comes to a close.

Thus far, we have been following a woman who has been stranded out at sea and presumed dead but has had only a light guiding her way. And when looking back through the last few sections, ‘Hello Earth’ takes us to the end of her spiritual journey, where she starts to observe her surroundings and realise that she is going to be rescued after contemplating her own demise.

Compared to the comedown of the first track, ‘The Morning Fog’ feels like greeting the day again and having a renewed appreciation for life after everything was thrown sideways on the former track. Bush always made songs that made people question what a pop song could be, but this was one of the first times that people got a good look at what happens when the pop sphere meets a theatrical production.

‘Blood/DNA’ – Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar has never been an artist that can be listened to casually. The whole point behind many of his albums is to check in with him and see how he is managing the struggles of being one of the best rappers in the world, and after To Pimp a Butterfly set the world on fire, it was now open season on anyone who dared to question what his opinions were. The hope of his last record was a great change of pace, but inspiring someone also means having some nasty after-effects as well.

While Damn is one of Lamar’s most commercially successful projects, the opening lays out all of the ugliness that exists within the record. Lamar is not willing to be the flashy rapper everyone wants him to be, and ‘Blood’ already details the frustration he’s feeling trying to help people, knowing that someone as innocent as an old blind woman could pull a gun on him and leave him as a statistic within the span of a few seconds.

Before we can even recover, though, we get pieces of commentary from news correspondents and whatever supposed other titles that Fox News anchors call themselves as they dissect Lamar’s lyrics when ‘DNA’ starts fading in. And given how ready for war Lamar feels on this first stretch of tunes, it’s clear that he’s not ready to roll over. He knew that there was hope for any kid like him to make it, but if they insisted on him being a rapper who sang only about one thing, he was going to throw it back in their faces.

‘Cygnus X-1/Hemispheres’ – Rush

Nothing about Rush’s discography has ever been about taking the easy route for the singles market. The band’s entire appeal was based on having one of the most devoted fanbases in prog, and even though half of the songs during the 1970s went well past nine minutes, it’s not like they were looking to break into the Billboard charts with one of their tunes. ‘Closer to the Heart’ may have been an anomaly on A Farewell to Kings, but the final stretch of that album hinted at the hidden epic inside the band’s releases.

After telling the story of a man who has a less-than-stellar experience going into a black hole, ‘Hemispheres’ picks up directly where that left off by having this man be shown the different layers of the cosmos and go on a celestial spirit journey throughout every section. Then again, the only problem that Rush fans ran into was the fact that they had to go to two completely different sections of an album to hear one complete story.

While the band thankfully made a bonus EP for the fans that combines both of those tunes together, the fact that they had to do that shows what they thought about the concept to begin with. They had every intention of releasing both of them together, but the only possible thing holding them back was the physical medium that they were working with during recording.

‘Give Me Novacaine/She’s A Rebel’ – Green Day

The fact that any piece of American Idiot by Green Day managed to get on the radio feels like a strange miracle. No one in pop-punk was able to make something this gargantuan and walk away clean, and yet Billie Joe Armstrong showed everyone from Yellowcard to Blink-182 to Good Charlotte that there was a damn good reason why they were considered the best that the genre had to offer. And while ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ was the main epic, everything that came after was like bite-sized pieces of brilliance.

Even though the penultimate song, ‘Homecoming’, operates as the other major epic from the record, a lot of the best moments come when songs fade into each other. ‘Give Me Novacaine’ may be one of the few points of respite after being introduced to ‘St Jimmy’, but right after trying to numb the pain of what the protagonist has been feeling, he’s thrown on his ass on ‘She’s A Rebel’, meeting the girl of his dreams and perfectly summing up the destructive romance on the cover.

While ‘Are We The Waiting’ had already done this kind of stunt leading into ‘St Jimmy’, this pair does a better job at telling the entire story of the record in roughly five minutes. At the end of the day, the Jesus of Suburbia is only trying to find someone to relate to, and with a slow ballad and a fierce rocker put right next to each other, the rage and love in his heart are both accounted for.

‘Kim/ ’97 Bonnie and Clyde’ – Eminem

There was always a certain theatricality that came with every new Eminem release. Even though he struck gold by being the hip-hop equivalent of a dirty Saturday morning cartoon, he could have a heart when he wanted to when looking at tunes like ‘Rock Bottom’ or ‘Stan’. There were a lot of layers to the Marshall Mathers underneath it all, but when Slim Shady was brought out, everyone knew that something really funny or really messed up was about to happen.

Although the songs in question are out of order in terms of release date, ‘Kim’ is where the whole story begins, with Slim putting his daughter to bed before leading his girlfriend out into the woods. It’s clear that everything isn’t right with this man before the dark section even begins, but playing this song in full is bound to be a triggering listen for anyone who suffered from domestic problems, complete with a “death” scene where he fantasises about killing his other half.

Even though ‘Kim’ sounds dark, ‘97 Bonnie and Clyde’ is definitely the darker subject matter, where he picks up his daughter and takes her out on a moonlight drive to the lake to drag his mother’s corpse into the water and let her perish in the waters below. There was always a certain tongue-in-cheek energy to the way that Eminem discussed violence, but this was one of the first times where you had to wonder if he was genuinely insane.

‘Us and Them/Any Colour You Like’ – Pink Floyd

The number one rule of any playthrough of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is that there should be no interruptions. This is the embodiment of what vinyl was made for, and even the crime of listening to the record on streaming services runs the risk of someone having to sit through an ad in between important sections of the record. But if there’s one section that no one should dare touch, it’s the transition between ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Any Colour You Like’.

While the greater context of the album might be about listening to tracks like ‘Money’ or ‘Time’, this section marks the point where the genuine pathos of the record comes in, where we get a second to, as Roger Waters wrote, breathe in the air and take a look at the problems that are going on around us. Right as we hit this epic crescendo with those celestial voices swelling to this massive climax, ‘Any Colour You Like’s fantastic keyboard intro comes roaring in and brings us to a completely different sonic space.

The whole tune wasn’t meant to have any lyrics, but hearing Richard Wright and David Gilmour cutting loose made everyone realise the monotony they were listening to, almost like going back to the normal world of everyday people plucking into their jobs for the day. It might be the dark byproduct of spending too much time working one’s life away, but since the whole record is about the dangers of the present and warning about the future, both tracks are the album’s mission statement in their own way.

‘We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions’ – Queen

Queen were never ones to take a conventional route when making one of their hits. They were more than interested in making the kind of songs that got them the big bucks, but that only was a by-product of their hard work making tracks like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ one of the greatest epics in rock history. After toying with perfection, they knew the next best thing was to get something that the audience could participate in.

Although ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are the Champions’ are meant to be completely different tracks, they work perfectly well off each other. The former might not have much to work with aside from layers of percussion, but ‘We Are the Champions’ is the ultimate rock and roll triumph song, being one of their cornerstone tracks that brought millions of disparate people together when they played Live Aid.

If there’s only one thing wrong with the final version of both tunes, it’s how they were released on News of the World. I mean, here are two of the biggest showstopping numbers of the band’s career that would send anyone off on a high, and yet they are the first two tracks on the album? Like it or not, that’s a recipe for disaster because as much as people love the idea of starting off strong, nothing could have ever competed with this.

‘Eruption/You Really Got Me’ – Van Halen

It’s testing fate to start anyone’s career with a cover song. Even though many people have spent years making cover songs one of the cornerstone pieces of their sound, making a non-original tune one of the lead-off singles right out of the gate puts someone in dangerous territory of starting their career the same way that a band like Alien Ant Farm did before they petered out. But this isn’t a complete cover song from Van Halen; it’s a guitar solo that happens to have another song attached to it.

Because before even getting into their version of The Kinks’s ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Eruption’ is the moment where every single guitarist’s mind was blown. Everyone had seen their contemporaries play at breakneck speeds, but hearing Eddie tap for the first time changes something in every musician’s DNA as soon as they hear it as if they are unlocking different parts of their brain that haven’t been discovered. But before they have time to recover, we hear what that technique sounds like in context in ‘You Really Got Me’ with a solo using tapping.

While it makes no sense to have an instrumental preamble being played on the radio, there’s a good chance that every single radio station knew what they had on their hands once that first Van Halen came across the desk. After all, the entire mentality is to get people’s attention whenever they listen, and if anyone heard ‘Eruption’ for a second, they were hooked in and needed to know everything about the person responsible for it.

‘The End/Dead!’ – My Chemical Romance

Every single My Chemical Romance was based on some kind of musical story. Gerard Way had always looked at his lyrics the same way that a screenwriter might look at a script, and if he was going to make it into an album, he needed to make sure everything was airtight. And since every good movie has to start off with a good opening scene, the one-two punch of ‘The End’ and ‘Dead!’ kick things off in spectacularly dark fashion.

Since the whole story is based around one man’s descent into the afterlife while dying from cancer, the opening acoustic guitar puts us in the storytelling mood before giving way to heavy power chords for the second section. Right as we reach this epic zenith, everything gives way to the first riffs of ‘Dead!’, where we get most of the exposition behind this man’s journey, being told that he has only two weeks to live and thinking that his life has been one big joke due to him dying so young.

But the true attention to detail comes when the transition happens, where a faint frequency is heard in the background. The guitars are already pounding, but we’re already in the operating room with him, as the sound insinuates that his heart died. My Chemical Romance were already willing to take risks on the album before, but this is the moment they stopped telling stories and entered the same artistic realm that was normally reserved for artists like Pink Floyd and David Bowie.

‘Sgt Peppers/With a Little Help From My Friends – The Beatles

Every single conceptual album that has come out since the 1960s is forever going to be compared to Sgt Pepper. Paul McCartney might not have been the first person to float the idea of having an imaginary band that made off-the-wall music, but anyone looking to tell a story over the span of a record is always going to live in the shadow of the strange tunes that turned up on here, whether it’s the freakout of ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ or the musical epic poem of ‘A Day in the Life’. Like any great opening scene, though, we get introduced to our merry band of musicians over the course of the first two tracks.

Even though ‘Sgt Peppers’ does a great job at setting up the story of what this musical mastermind did with his band, it’s still one of the fiercest rock songs in their catalogue, so much so that Jimi Hendrix’s cover doesn’t feel that out of place compared to the original. Right as we are on cloud nine, we’re sent up to the clouds where Ringo Starr is waiting to serenade us as the character of Billy Shears.

While Starr is admittedly far from the greatest singer in the world, ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ is mandatory listening after the opening number, as if leading everyone into the first tune of this sideshow where everyone gets by, gets high, and tries with their best mates by their side. Then again, this kind of mentality may as well have been the subtext of what The Beatles themselves were doing. No one expected them to take such a big leap, and yet listening to them bounce off each other was the whole reason the album worked.