Welcome to Music Monday, where I tell you about music I love and how it relates to storytelling, or maybe just spam you with music videos.  And fair warning, I don’t care if an album is old–in this case, two years old.

Here, from the Marianas Trench album Astoria:

Astoria is a concept album, and I love a good concept album.  Josh Ramsay (the cutie with the blue hair and the Tolkien rune tattoo) was going through a difficult time, which he decided to process through the album–but he knew he needed to include something to make himself feel better.  What he hit on was the 1980s, which is the era that he (and I) were kids.  The video above is loosely based on the so-bad-it’s-good movie The Warriors, for example.

So in Astoria you get a really interesting mix of dark, heavy lyrics paired with pop-heavy, dancy tunes.  I found it by accident when writing the novel that’s currently out on sub, and I stumbled across one of the more serious songs, One Love:

As I see it the album Astoria is the story of grieving a relationship.  It starts with denial and moves through the stages of grief until you get to acceptance and moving on at the end.

I picked out specific songs, though, as I was working on my novel.  My couple gets their happily ever after, even though their relationship gets strained almost to the breaking point.  For that the anguished hope of several of the tracks (One Love, Wildfire, While We’re Young) put me in the perfect headspace as I wrote.

Plus, it’s just fun to sing along.

What’s are you all singing along to these days?