Your favorite 'concept' album


I'm not a concept album fan, however there are a few I've gone down the rabbit hole with. My personal fave, is '10,000 Years' by The Honeydogs. The backstory & lyrics are so vivid, and futuristic, it never fails to reveal something new to me. Even the bandleader said at times he's not sure what it's about.

Fascinating info & interview in the url. Check it out! 

Any others? 
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For those interested, the Smile boxset is still available through Amazon. Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks started working on this musical imagination on the subject of Manifest Destiny (look it up ;-) in 1966, and closed it down in mid-'67. It is the great "lost work" in Rock 'n' Roll history, Brian's follow-up to the Pet Sounds album.

The boxset contains every second of the recordings Brian and Van Dyke were able to get on tape before Brian collapsed. You can read the details on Smile in two chapters in the great book Outlaw Blues by Paul Williams, which were originally published in Crawdaddy magazine as the Smile recordings were being made.

Smile may just change your life, musically. It would have been a masterpiece had it been completed; even unfinished it is astonishing. It is not legendary for no good reason. 

@pgaulke, I would say a concept album is one that carries a consistent theme from beginning to end, like Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys (another all-time concept album) develops several themes around innocence and the loss of it – the innocence of youth, post-war America, American family life, lost love. By the end, the theme of the concept has been developed sufficiently so that the way you look at it is not the same as when the album started, for example, "Caroline, No" in the Beach Boys example.