No risk, no fun. If Michael Sadler is to be believed, he and his band colleagues have not only followed this motto for 40 years in the music business - and not badly. Exactly 20 years ago was exactly such a moment. After the critically viewed album "Steel Umbrellas" it would have been easy for the Canadians to play it safe and record a more proggig CD with the classic Saga trademarks. But they went "all in". The choice fell on a concept album. "Generation 13" was the name of the almost 70-minute opus - no easy fare. "Of course, that was a risk back then, one hundred percent," Sadler recalls. "They screamed in horror at our record company when we came up with the idea." But the courage was rewarded: "Looking back, I would say it belongs to our classic albums. It's a milestone in our discography. And I remember with pleasure how the guys from the record company reacted when it became a success after all."
Lost Generation
Even 20 years later, the topic being dealt with has lost none of its topicality. Based on the book "13th Gen - Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?" by Neil Howe and William "Bill" Strauss Saga told the story of the generation born between 1961 and 1981 using the orphan Jeremy as an example. Of children who grew up in broken families, often without a parent and not well protected, and who were exposed to the constraints, influences and temptations of a modern performance and media society. "What happens to such young people? The question is as relevant today as it was then, and it will always be, even if it was designed for a very specific generation here," says Sadler, for whom the making of the record and the recordings were a "welcome challenge," as he says today. First, the band had never recorded a pure concept album - the "Chapters" were just a loose sequence of somehow connected numbers spread over several albums. And also the approach was a different one. "Normally you write to yourself and then work on the songs together in the studio," says Sadler. "Generation 13" didn't work out that way. Every day we only took certain instruments and played them in. It was like a big puzzle with lots of little pieces."
Bassist Jim Crichton had delivered the big master plan. The brother of guitarist Ian Crichton not only designed the concept and wrote the storyline. As a composer he was also responsible for all the songs. The 25 parts that merged into each other were thoroughly composed and well thought out, all determined down to the smallest detail. "That's why we already had the finished result in our heads during the recordings, which distinguishes it from all our other albums," says Sadler, who was also able to show off his vocal versatility here. This little anecdote shows how the situation was in the studio: "We had a flipchart in the studio. It had all the song titles on it, and we always ticked off when something was in the box. When we thought we were finished, we suddenly realized there was another page. That was very funny. We thought we were further than we really were."
