The Alan Parsons Project
The Alan Parsons Project came into being when sound engineer Alan Parsons met songwriter Eric Woolfson in the canteen at Abbey Road Studios in the summer of 1974. Parsons already had a legendary CV – he was assistant engineer on the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Let It Be, and the engineer behind Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Woolfson had long been working on a concept album based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and together they found a formula where Parsons’ production genius met Woolfson’s melodic songwriting. The result was the debut album Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1976), which laid the foundation for a series of ambitious concept records on Arista Records.
Over 15 years they released eleven studio albums, with I Robot (1977), The Turn of a Friendly Card (1980), and Eye in the Sky (1982) as the most successful. The project never performed live during its heyday – this was a pure studio vision, built layer by layer with a shifting cast of session musicians and guest vocalists. Among their best-known songs are “Games People Play,” “Time,” “Eye in the Sky,” and “Don’t Answer Me.” The instrumental piece “Sirius” has taken on a life of its own as one of the world’s most recognizable intro tracks in the sporting world, most famously as the Chicago Bulls’ walk-on theme. In 1990, Parsons and Woolfson parted ways – Woolfson devoted himself to musical theatre, while Parsons launched The Alan Parsons Live Project and took the music on the road for the first time, with many of the original session musicians in the band.
Parsons has been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, winning his first in 2019. Musically, The Alan Parsons Project occupies a space all its own where progressive rock, art-pop, and symphonic grandeur converge. The albums are thematic journeys through science, literature, psychology, and science fiction, wrapped in a production that is as precise as it is epic. This is music made by and for people who believe the studio is an instrument in itself – and it sounds just as good today as it did 50 years ago.
The Groove is music.nw’s own measure of renown — not an opinion, a fact computed from the record. It weighs reach (how many people engaged) against acclaim (how highly they rated it), balanced so a handful of votes can’t outshout a lasting favourite.
Computed the NeuraWeb way, across the whole record. The same yardstick for everyone — which is why the little-known can out-Groove the famous in their own corner.
How The Alan Parsons Project moved
Genre belongs to the record, not to the artist. Every album’s Groove is shared out across the genres it actually is — by how the raters tagged it — so nobody is 100% one thing. Stack that by decade and a career draws itself.
Discography
