10 Perfect Prog Rock Songs That Are Ridiculously Long

In the vinyl era, you started to see the song list on albums start to shorten with many progressive rock bands. The creative medium could only hold so much sound, so you could only make a handful of these epics on one album if you actually wanted to have a lot of songs on the record. As prog started hitting its stride though, Jethro Tull cut out the middle man and just decided to make the entire album one long song.

On both sides of the vinyl, Thick as a Brick runs as one grand piece of music, telling a story that Ian Anderson had thought of across its runtime. This is an album length song though, meaning they had to pull out all the stops, from having sections that are completely acapella to eventually bringing in layers of guitars and different sections that almost serve as subtle interludes in between parts of the story.

For a minute, this almost seems to fit outside of the prog rock genre altogether. If you go back and listen to the vocal inflections and the way they play with sound on here, this almost feels closer to hearing an audio play taking place on a record rather than a progressive rock band. The concept of prog doesn't know any boundaries though, and this was where we were starting to go into the theatrical side of rock and roll.