Alan Parsons

The Best of the Alan Parsons Project, Vol. 2 typically picks up where its predecessor left off. With 11 tracks covering seven albums, including Gaudi, Stereotomy, and Vulture Culture, the songs here are a tad weaker than those on the first collection, since some of the albums that these songs originate from were not of this band's finest caliber. The highlights here include both "Prime Time" and "Don't Answer Me" from Ammonia Avenue, and the provocative instrumental "I Robot," the only non-vocal track on the album. All of the selections on this package convey their purpose much better within their former albums, since each song is a link in the album's conceptual chain.

Alan Parsons studied a number of musical instruments in childhood but, like many of his peers, settled on the guitar in his early teens. His job in the late 1960s at the EMI tape duplication facility allowed him access to many classics of the day, including the tape master of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which fired him up to become a recording engineer. He subsequently managed to get work at the Abbey Road Studios and participated in the creation of The Beatles albums Let It Be (1970) and Abbey Road (1969) and the infamous Apple rooftop session. He also went on to work as mix engineer with Paul McCartney and George Harrison after The Beatles split…

Legendary artist and studio maestro Alan Parsons has announced the release of a new live album entitled “The Neverending Show: Live in the Netherlands” on November 5, 2021. The show was recorded live on May 5, 2019 and showcases the performance that Alan Parsons Live Project held at the Tivoli in Utrecht, Netherlands. The band was, as usual, in fine form and fed extra energy by an enthusiastic audience. An amazing performance by quite possibly the definitive band line-up of exemplary musicians that Alan has toured with.

Along with The Definitive Collection, The Essential Alan Parsons Project gives the casual fan the proper mixture and proportion of radio hits, Alan Parsons' signature instrumentals, and Eric Woolfsons' thought-provoking ballads. Best of all, SONY/BMG has included the once lost gemstone No Answers Only Questions (Final Version) that Eric Woolfson composed and guitarist Ian Bairnson arranged. Everything has been digitally remastered from the best available source tapes…

The 12 tracks that appear on The Best of the Alan Parsons Project include some of their greatest singles, like "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" from 1977's I Robot and the inducing "Games People Play" off of The Turn of a Friendly Card. Even though these songs are splendid all by themselves, they seem to lose their conceptual weight when taken away from their original albums. As singles, they do act as a fine representation of how The Alan Parsons Project's music sounds and conveys its mysterious air, but even with a dozen singles on this album there's just too much of their other worthy material that is sadly left off. Present is their biggest single and most alluring piece, "Eye in the Sky," from the album of the same name, and the entrancing "Time" from Turn of a Friendly Card.

Between 1976 and 1987, the Alan Parsons Project released ten studio albums, most of them going at least gold in the U.S., several generating big hit singles, too. This was enough to sustain a vigorous cult audience well into 2014, which is when Legacy boxed all ten of the Alan Parsons Project albums, adding the scrapped 1981 record The Sicilian Defense to bring in the hardcore who already have purchased this catalog several times over, including deluxe editions that contain bonus material nowhere to be found here…