Background
A concept album, the album is a fictional account of Chicago’s Paradise Theatre from its opening in 1928 to its closing in 1958 (and eventual abandonment), used as a metaphor for America’s changing times from the late 1970s into the 1980s. (Dennis DeYoung, who envisioned and developed the entire concept, confirmed this in an episode of In the Studio with Redbeard about the making of the album.)
DeYoung has said that the theme of the album is “one of hope and renewal in the spirit of the American people to understand the problems that confront the world and this country and find solutions themselves to those problems. Don’t depend on heroes to do what you must do for yourself. If you hate your job but you have a dream, then pursue it. Just don’t sit around and complain about it.”
Newsday critic Wayne Robins stated that the songs “deal with people out of sync with themselves and their environment.” For example, “Too Much Time on My Hands” is about a man who is unemployed and has given up, he regards “Lonely People” as a “contemporary rewrite of the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,'” and “Nothing Ever Goes as Planned” is about “the inevitability of failure.”
This User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; Source: Last.fm.