Alan Parsons has enjoyed a long and successful music career as an engineer, producer, and recording artist (with the Alan Parsons Project) . Alan began his career in his late teens as a guitarist in various folk and blues bands in his home town of London, England. However, after listening to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album in 1967, Alan was so inspired that he applied for and successfully landed a job at the famous Abbey Road Studios. From that point on, it was clear that the world of sound recording would dominate his music career.

Alan was fortunate enough to work as an assistant engineer on the final two Beatles albums; “Abbey Road” and “Let it Be.” During this period, he established a working relationship with Paul McCartney which led to the recording of “Wild Life” and “Red Rose Speedway.” These experiences eventually led to Alan’s work as the engineer on Pink Floyd’s classic “Dark Side of the Moon” album. Alan received a Grammy nomination for this effort, and he then began a successful career as a producer. His production credits include Al Stewart’s hugely popular “Year of the Cat” album, as well as two records by the band Ambrosia.

Alan met songwriter Eric Woolfson in 1974, and the two men formed a musical partnership that became known as the Alan Parsons project. Although Woolfson kept a much lower profile than Parsons, his contributions as a collaborator were critical to the group’s success over the years. Their first album together was “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” and was based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The debut album was recorded over two years and achieved only modest success. However, it paved the way for the long string of wildly successful albums that would follow.

In 1977, the Alan Parsons Project released the “I, Robot” album which was described as “a view of tomorrow through the eyes of today.” The album was a huge success, and it included the group’s first major hit single; the funky sounding “Wouldn’t Want to be Like You.” The group’s next album was “Pyramid,” which was described as “a look at yesterday through the eyes of today.” By this time, the Alan Parsons Project had established a large fan base throughout the world, as their combination of progressive ideas with accessible pop melodies proved to be a winning formula.

The Alan Parsons Project continued their streak of successful albums with 1979’s “Eve” and 1980’s “Turn of a Friendly Card.” The biggest hit singles from this period include “Damned If I Do,” “Time,” and “Games People Play.” After a brief rest, the group returned with “Eye in the Sky” in 1980. The George Orwellian title track was a gigantic hit, but the instrumental opening track “Sirius” has turned out to be the most widely heard song in the group’s catalog. While not widely known by its name, the tune has been featured at numerous sporting events, most notably as the theme song for the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls. The instrumental was also featured in the film “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.”

The Alan Parsons Project continued to release successful albums throughout the 1980s and 1990s. However, due to the use of various musicians in the studio, the group had never performed live during this period. This would change in the mid-1990s, when Alan decided to put together a live band that was titled “Alan Parsons Live Project.” It was certainly a treat for the group’s legions of fans to finally get a chance to see the group’s many popular songs performed live for the first time. This “Live Project” continues to tour to this day, and it has certainly kept alive the wonderful music of the Alan Parsons Project.

In addition to his work with the “Live Project,” Alan has kept himself busy as a producer and with various other projects. I had the pleasure of speaking with him recently by telephone, and he described some of these projects during our conversation:

WM: I saw the Alan Parsons Live Project perform a few years ago at the Mohegan Sun. Do you remember that show?

AP: Oh sure. It would be very hard to forget. I thought the show went quite well, and we got a good reaction. The main thing that I remember is the hotel and spa, and all that stuff.

WM: Do you plan to ever bring the group back to this area?

AP: I would love to. I’m just waiting for the phone to ring (laughs). I generally don’t go calling the Mohegan Sun to ask them if they would like to have us perform. They would have to call us.

WM: During the band’s heyday of the 70s and 80s, the Alan Parsons project did not perform concerts. What was the reason for not touring during this period, and what made you decide to finally start doing so?

AP: Basically, a record producer isn’t necessarily an artist. That was the problem. We decided that the Alan Parsons Project would simply be a studio outfit. We were an outfit that made records, and then promoted them through radio and the music press. In retrospect, I think it was a very bad decision because we could have been huge if we had started playing live performances much sooner.

The basic problem was that I was not perceived as a musician, and I certainly wasn’t a singer. It was just an assembly of talent that came together in the studio. It was considered difficult to find a role on stage for me. It was joked that I could warm up the audience by telling a few jokes, and then I would leave the performance to other people. When we eventually did play live in the mid-nineties, I dusted off my guitar and discovered that I was a reasonably proficient player, and that I could do it.

Another reason that live performance was not tackled sooner was that between the time that we started (in 1976) and when we began playing live (in 1995), there was an enormous technological development in keyboards. It was out of the question to consider that the keyboards of the 1970s would have been able to reproduce all of the sounds that we needed to create for a live show. By the mid-nineties, MIDI was around. Sampling was around. Digital boxes of all shapes and sizes were around. That made a huge difference to the capability of the live band. The best thing about it - is that it reestablished us as an act. Playing live has kept our name alive. Like I said, I wish we had done it sooner.

WM: I understand that you have released an instructional video series titled “The Art & Science of Sound Recording.” Please tell me about this series, and how did it come about?

AP: It came about through an old friend who was a co-producer with me. He made his own series about twenty years ago. He did really well with it, and he approached me to do an up-to-date, and a much more comprehensive version of it. We cover every single aspect of sound recording. It is interspersed with many interviews that I conducted with various artists and engineers. So you get a really wide viewpoint and scope of everything. It’s been out for almost two years now, and it’s done pretty well. We’re getting a lot of interest, and our main focus now is educational establishments. We’re getting people to incorporate the video series into their curricula.

WM: In today’s music business, a lot of people are listening to MP3s and the sound quality is not the greatest. What is your opinion of this development?

AP: Well, the consumer always settles for the worst format. That’s the sad fact of life. We had to live with cassettes for a while, and now we’re living with MP3s. It’s the same situation. I hate MP3s, especially when the technology exists for people to have a better format, but they just don’t go for it because the MP3 downloads quicker.

I think it’s time for a new high-resolution physical audio format. However, the indications are that physical media may be completely gone within five years. That’s just a fact of life. I think for audiophiles, a nice 6K or 24-bit, or 32-bit might be the way of the future. The computer will have to move on quite a ways for that to happen. We will have to get faster downloads and bigger memories in our computers. Then it will be realistic.

WM: Do you see yourself playing a role in that development?

AP: Oh, no. I am approaching retirement now, and that’s a mammoth task. I think I would reject any involvement frankly.

WM: How did you originally learn the art of sound engineering?

AP: I managed to land a job at Abbey Road Studios at the age of nineteen. I was already connected to EMI Records through another department in East London. It was the tape duplication department. That’s how it started. I trained as an engineer, and within two years I was a sound engineer. It all happened very quickly.

WM: I understand that you worked with the Beatles on their final two records, “Abbey Road” and “Let it Be.” Do you have any memories of this period that you would like to share?

AP: Oh, that’s a daft question (laughs). Of course I have memories, and I shall put them all in a book one day.

WM: Understood. The one thing that stands out from that period for me is that I have read that Paul McCartney was very unhappy with the final version of “Let it Be.” Did you share that opinion?

AP: I think everybody had long faces on that occasion. It was Paul’s idea to make a live album, and the others didn’t necessarily agree with that philosophy. Live in the studio, and on the rooftop. That day on the rooftop is one of the most vivid memories that I have. Just being up there on the rooftop with the Beatles playing live was very special.

WM: After the Beatles, you eventually went on to be the engineer on Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” record. How did that come about? Also, please share any memories that you have from that experience.

AP: It came about through my having engineered the mix of their previous record - “Atom Heart Mother.” This was kind of a happy accident. The person who had engineered the recording was Peter Bown, and he had another artist that insisted on working with him, so he was not available for the next Pink Floyd record. Rather than getting an engineer who had never worked with them before, they said “let’s just see how Alan gets on.” Since I had mixed “Atom Heart Mother” for them and they were pleased, they hired me as the engineer for “Dark Side of the Moon.” I was just doing my job on the staff at Abbey Road Studios.

WM: Did you have any idea that it would become such an iconic record?

AP: I think we all felt good about it. We all thought that it was by far the best Floyd album to date, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted that it would still be around forty years later, or that we would still be talking about it forty years later.

WM: After a successful career as a producer, you went on to form the Alan Parsons Project. What made you decide to make the switch to become a recording artist?

AP: The identity was actually an act on the part of the record label. They referred to what we were doing as the “Alan Parsons Project.” The name just stuck as the identity of the act. I honestly thought that the “star” of that first record was going to be Edgar Allan Poe and not me. It was going to be various artists with my name in small print as the producer. It turned out that in order to market the record, they felt they needed to create the name of an act with my name on it. So that’s what happened. In terms of performing, well I already told you that story.

WM: Could you please describe how you and your partner (Eric Woolfson) worked together? What were the strengths that each of you contributed to the Alan Parsons project?

AP: Eric was a very gifted songwriter, and he was without question the principal songwriter of the outfit. We would occasionally write a song together, and we would occasionally work more or less apart. We would then come together with our ideas in the studio. His strength was in the songwriting, and my strength was in the sound and production. I was always involved in restructuring some of his songs. He would come into the studio with verses and a chorus, and then we would restructure the song so that it would make sense vocally and instrumentally, and so forth. We worked well together, and it was a good team.

WM: Did he mind having the group being called the Alan Parsons Project?

AP: Well, in retrospect I think he thought it was perhaps not a very good decision. I did get all of the limelight, and he was often brushed aside for want of a better word. I think he would have been much happier if it had been some type of mutual band name. Then we both would have gotten proper credit. Since my name was on the records, I got all of the credit.

WM: As a long-time fan of your music, I have always classified it as progressive rock but with much more of a pop sensibility. Do you agree with this classification?

AP: Oh, very much so. I was almost surprised that we were originally considered to be progressive rock. I would have thought that progressive pop is a much better description. We didn’t have towering guitar riffs that were impossible to play, or different time signatures every eight bars, or all that kind of stuff. I agree that we were more in the pop vein than the prog rock people were.

WM: Is it safe to assume that the instrumental “Sirius” has been the most lucrative piece of music that you have ever been involved with?

AP: Well you would think so, because it gets so much exposure during American sports events. Interestingly, in terms of money-making, having a piece of music playing in a sports stadium is almost worthless because it’s covered by the blanket arrangement between the venue, the record company, and ASCAP. So I don’t get any direct payment when “Sirius” gets played at sports stadiums, unfortunately.

If it’s featured in a movie, that’s different. We made some good money on “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” But “Sirius” is certainly our most exposed piece, and everybody knows that piece of music. Interestingly, not everybody knows that it’s by the Alan Parsons Project.

WM: It seems to me that a lot of your instrumentals would work great in movies or television.

AP: I wish that were the case. I wish more attention had been given to the instrumentals. We’re about to enter a new phase in our publishing career, so we are renegotiating. So there might be an opportunity to pitch our music more towards movies. I would be delighted to have our music featured in the movies, and I’m just waiting for the phone to ring.

I did do one movie in the mid-eighties called “Ladyhawke.” I didn’t actually write the music, I just produced it.

WM: This final question is open-ended. If you have any current or future projects that you would like to discuss, please do so.

AP: I just finished working as a producer on two very different albums. The first is the virtuoso of the ukulele, Jake Shimabukuro. The record features the ukulele with an orchestra on a few tracks. He also plays with a standard rhythm section on a few other tracks. That was a great experience. That record is coming out October 2nd I believe, and that’s the first thing I’m excited about.

The other record is by the band Porcupine Tree. Steven Wilson is the front man, and he hired me to record the tracks for his latest album. I’m more of an engineer, but also the associate producer for that one. He is very much a producer, and always has been. That was just last week in Hollywood. That record is not due for release until February. It’s a great record, and it’s real prog rock, this stuff.