Prodigals is telling a story. A universal story of wanting to belong and not fitting in. Of searching for a place of belonging, of searching for the greener pasture. It's about realizing that love is at the center of it all and without love, no matter how green the field, its a lonely lonely place. Its about finding something lost in and finding it where you started. Its about the redeeming power of love and the souring bitterness of un-forgiveness. Its an epic (and here I use the true use of the word, not the co-opted modern day version) story, its the human story.
So all of this has to find itself in the first song in some form. It will tell the whole story while still telling its part of the story. It's a tall order. One that may take some time...
Since the entire project will be telling a story, each song needs to add to that story and advance it. In a typical album project, things aren't necessarily so planned. Over the course of time, the writer writes songs and, I would argue in many cases, that the album has cohesion because it is written over the same timeframe. What comes out of the artist is a reflection of their life in some matter over that time period. For this reason, when an album doesn't hang together, when the tracks are disjointed, it gives an "inauthentic feel".
Even when the artist purchases the songs, the song selection will reflect what is going on in the artist (or producer perhaps more often) at the time period of the selection. Or, if the song is written FOR an artist, there is some sense of who the artist is when the songwriter is writing for the singer. Great care is taken, in producing an album, to make sure the album hangs together and has a similar feel. Often, this is where the brilliance of the mastering engineer comes in. A band assembles a record of 10 tracks, all recorded at different times in different studios and the mastering engineer has to make them all sound like they "fit". Rough job.
This speaks to congruence as well. Things have to hang together and make sense in the whole. Perhaps its no different in life. In life we'd call it integrity. We gravitate towards the genuine and retreat from the disingenuous or--fake. We're all looking for Truth. Authenticity. And believe it or not, we pick up on these things in art and music and even in the album. We have a built in Truth sensor with a "smoke and mirrors" detector. We know when we are being spun and when something is just a bit off, even if we can't place it.
This is the challenge of the artist. To communicate Truth. Not just on the micro or song level, but on the macro or album level as well.
