Alan Parsons Project: Tales of Mystery & Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe

PyramidA group of veteran session musicians working under producer Alan Parsons and songwriter Eric Woolfson releases its debut album, The Alan Parsons Project – Tales Of Mystery And Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe. The “group” becomes known, somewhat unintentionally, as the Alan Parsons Project, though that was intended to be part of the album title. Themed around the works of Poe, the album becomes a prog rock cult classic and sells well enough that Parsons and Woolfson begin planning a more futuristic project… Read more

Alan Parsons Project: I Robot

PyramidThe Alan Parsons Project releases its second album, I Robot, including the singles “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”, “Breakdown” and “Don’t Let It Show” (the latter of which is covered latered by Pat Benatar). The album is loosely themed around fear of the future and technology, a far cry from the original plan for a concept album built around Isaac Asimov’s story “I, Robot” (though Asimov allows the album’s title since it lacks the comma). This is the Project’s first album on Arista Records. Read more

Andrew Powell and the Philharmonia Orchestra Play the Best of the Alan Parsons Project

Andrew Powell and the Philharmonia Orchestra Play the Best of the Alan Parsons ProjectMobile Fidelity Sound Lab releases Andrew Powell’s elaborately-titled cover album Andrew Powell and the Philharmonia Orchestra Play the Best of the Alan Parsons Project, featuring new orchestral arrangements of the Project’s back catalog devised by Powell (who also arranges the orchestral components of the Project’s recordings). Read more

Alan Parsons Project: Tales v2.0

Turn Of A Friendly CardThe Alan Parsons Project releases a remastered and revised edition of its first album, Tales of Mystery & Imagination, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. For the first time, narration recorded in 1976 by Orson Welles is heard in the context of the album itself. This is the first time the album has been available on CD. Read more

Alan Parsons Project: The Sicilian Defence

The Sicilian DefenceSony Legacy Records releases, as part of a career-spanning box set of the Alan Parsons Project discography, the previously-unreleased, all-instrumental 1979 album of demos titled The Sicilian Defence, named after a chess strategem. The album was originally submitted to Arista Records in the late ’70s in attempt to fulfill a contractual clause that would allow the band to seek another label. (The album will later be released on its own after the box set goes out of print.) Read more

Alan Parsons Project: The Turn Of A Friendly Card (35th anniversary edition)

The Turn Of A Friendly Card (35th anniversary edition)Sony / Legacy releases an expanded 2-CD edition of the Alan Parsons Project‘s 1980 album, The Turn Of A Friendly Card, for the 35th anniversary of the original album’s release, including work-in-progress versions of such familiar songs as “Games People Play” and “Time” and numerous other outtakes. Read more