Today I'm gonna be talking about the album Tommy, by The Who. The album is way too long for me to go song-by-song, so instead I'll talk about it as a whole, and mention a few songs just to illustrate some points.
I'll be honest- I don't listen to The Who very often. When I do, though, I'll often end up listening to this album. I've always been a fan of concept albums- anything from Alice Cooper to Pink Floyd- and honestly, this is one of the most coherent ones I've heard (admittedly, that's probably helped by seeing the movie). Essentially, this album tells the story of a young boy who witnesses something he shouldn't, and is told "[he] didn't hear it, [he] didn't see it], [he] won't say nothing to no-one never in [his] life". This ends up being taken literally- he becomes deaf, dumb and blind. The next bit of the album alternates between attempted cures for his condition, and occasional glimpses into his life, before finally, he gets cured. After this, he becomes famous, and tries to pass on the lessons he learned, but they're not well-received.
I quite like this album, both for the story and for the music. There's a lot of variation from song to song, stylistically, but the music always does a good job capturing the mood of the song. For instance- the song Cousin Kevin, which is about Tommy's sadistic bully of a cousin, is built on a fairly simple piano line played in a minor key. There are also some interesting instrumental pieces towards the beginning of the album- namely, Sparks and Underture. I don't often like instrumental songs, but I'm actually a fan of these two.
There's a lot of different song lengths in Tommy as well. Generally, songs that I listen to vary from around 25 to 10 minutes, but on this album, they get a lot shorter. One song is 10 seconds, two are around 25, one is about a minute, and then a few are between 1 and 2 minutes. Funny enough, the longest song is about 10 minutes, too. Normally I don't like overly short songs- just when you get into them, they end- but in the context of the album, they actually work well as transitions from one scene to the next. This works especially well in the movie version, when it's a literal scene change, and bits of the songs are moved around to be more convenient for the story.
The movie version of this album is actually very well done, too. It contains some big names in music- obviously The Who, as well as Elton John, Tina Turner and Eric Clapton. (I was quite surprised to learn Arthur Brown, who I wrote about previously, also appears in this movie- in the scene with Eric Clapton, he takes over singing partway through). There are some weird scenes, of course- that's to be expected from a movie of this sort, and this era- but overall, I'd definitely say it's worth watching.
Anyways, that's gonna be it for today- hopefully you enjoyed this post!
