Alan Parsons – The Secret
It used to be, in the 1970s and ’80s, that you could almost keep time by the release of Alan Parsons Project albums, with a new one arriving every year or every other year. Albums started to arrive more sparsely in the late ’80s, with members of the core group exploring side projects (Keats, Andrew Powell scoring Ladyhawke) and, finally, the album that broke the Project apart, Freudiana (which was released not as a Project album, but as the studio concept album for a stage musical). The seemingly hectic pace was made somewhat easier because the Project didn’t play live, though Parsons assembled a touring band (which wasn’t always made up of the same players he had in the studio) to begin touring in the 1990s. The two-or-three-year gaps between albums made more sense then, and the live show was every bit as good as you’d expect it to be given how artfully Parsons crafted the studio sound that went out under his name. And then, after 2004’s A Valid Path…nothing. A single came out alongside Parsons’ Art And Science Of Sound Recording DVD, and then a couple more singles. It was somewhere in there that I read an interview in which Parsons declared the album, and especially the concept album in which he had specialized, dead in the age of iTunes downloads. I really didn’t expect to hear anything more from him after that. He had moved on to teaching the next generation of studio wizards and no longer seemed to be in the business of making and releasing his own music.
And that’s a big part of what made the announcement that The Secret was forthcoming such a shock, 15 years after A Valid Path saw him dabbling in electronica. Not just that, but The Secret was going to be precisely the kind of concept album that the singles-centric iTunes ecosystem had rendered obsolete. And what’s more, it’s an amazingly good concept album – though all of the “stage magic” imagery may be obfuscating what that theme really is.
Hewing to long-standing Alan Parsons Project tradition, the album has a lengthy instrumental opener, with Steve Hackett shredding “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with an orchestral backing. From there, things get more traditional – “Miracle” is a throwback to the Project of old, with “As Lights Fall” returning to the same mid-tempo musical ground that had proven so effective for songs like “Eye In The Sky”, but it’s in “As Lights Fall” that Parsons – actually doing lead vocals for once – peels back the curtain on what the album’s really about: the imminence of mortality, and the notion that each individual life is really the greatest magic trick of all.
This concept – dressing itself up in allusions to stage magic before revealing the real underlying theme – recurs in “Soirée Fantastique”, “Requiem”, “Years Of Glory”, and “The Limelight Fades Away”. Mortality and the miracle of life itself is the real concept of this concept album – even “Soirée Fantastique” includes the lyric “all the illusions fall away”. So do the allusions: for all of the lyrical nods to performing magic tricks, in the end it acknowledges that mortality is the ultimate disappearing act. With songs like “As Lights Fall” adding an autobiographical dimension, I almost want to call Parsons up and ask, “hey, buddy, is there something you’re not telling us? I’m kinda worried now.” (Parsons is 71 at the time I write this, though he certainly doesn’t sound 71, so yeah, I get it, life and death and legacy are a real concern.)
High points of the album include the return of Foreigner crooner Lou Gramm’s powerful voice on “Sometimes”, the almost Cabaret-esque, burlesque-act-worthy “Requiem”, and my personal favorite, “One Note Symphony”, a song about the Schumann Resonance whose lead vocal is sung in a perfect monotone, while the harmonies woven around it make the song. I could pick nits about the lyrics leaning into some of the more “woo” new-age connotations of the Schumann Resonance (especially at a time when scientific literacy among the public seems to be plummeting more with each passing day at the worst possible time), but it’s a fun listen regardless.
The Secret may be the best album has turned out since the Project’s heyday, and it really does sit alongside the best of the Project’s output in the quality of both the songwriting and the performance and production of the songs, and the degree to which the songs and the underlying theme of the album have been thought out. At numerous points during this album, I found myself thinking that the late Eric Woolfson (composer and theme architect of the Project’s original string of concept albums) would have wholeheartedly approved of The Secret. It’s worthy of sitting alongside Eye In The Sky and I Robot.
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- The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (5:44)
- Miracle (3:22)
- As Lights Fall (3:58)
- One Note Symphony (4:43)
- Sometimes (5:08)
- Soirée Fantastique (5:27)
- Fly To Me (3:45)
- Requiem (4:02)
- Years Of Glory (4:05)
- The Limelight Fades Away (3:36)
- I Can’t Get There From Here (4:38)
Released by: Frontiers SRL
Release date: April 26, 2019
Total running time: 48:28
Six years after 
Parsons has said that he’s considering commencing work on a new studio album in 2010, but with a new tour (with a new touring band) announced for this summer as well, smart money is on a 2011 or later release. In the meantime, “All Our Yesterdays” and “Alpha Centauri” make for a nice bite-sized preview: hopefully Parsons isn’t done honing his own art (and/or science) of sound recording under his own name.
Alan Parsons is back, that’s the good news. And the bad news? There really isn’t any. Parsons has jettisoned some of his “classic rock” sound and stepped firmly and unquestionably into the 21st century. The result is an album that will hopefully gain Parsons a whole new audience – and considering how much of his longtime fanbase was attracted to the sound of Parsons routinely going further out than the cutting edge 30 years ago, A Valid Path should also be a treat for the folks like me who’ve been hanging around since the 1970s.
For years, it was a well-known fact that the Alan Parsons Project’s music has always been custom-constructed for the studio, and that the Project was strictly a studio entity. But the Alan Parsons Project just isn’t what it used to be. In some ways, this is good; in others, not quite so good. On the good side, returning for another round is Manfred Mann’s Chris Thompson, who did vocals on two of Try Anything‘s better tracks – the single “Turn It Up” and the much harder-edged “Back Against The Wall”. Not only does he do the singing duties on many of the past Project hits originally voiced by gravelly Lenny Zakatek, but he does a bloody good job of ’em. He sounds like he was born to sing “Psychobabble”. One of the album’s nice bonuses – originally the only reason I sprang for it but now one of many reasons – are three previously unreleased studio tracks, including the outstanding “You’re the Voice”, with Thompson again providing vocals; this song continues breaking new ground with unpredictable rythmic patterns, not unlike “Turn It Up” (though better). Possibly the greatest find on the album is the amazing medley of the instrumentals “Lucifer” (from the Eve album, my favorite Project of the 1970s) and “Mammagamma” (that vastly-overplayed, echoplexed, one-step-removed-from-disco instrumental you all remember from 1981’s Eye In The Sky). I never dreamed I’d hear a fresh twist on “Mammagamma” until I heard the band suddenly segue into that song’s string interlude via keyboard, whilst still retaining the light military beat of “Lucifer”. Wow! A must-hear for those who appreciate Parsons/Woolfson instrumentals. Still, there are drawbacks. No one can replace the voice on those songs which were originally sung by Eric Woolfson. Oh, they give it a game try, but it seems somehow wrong that another voice could sing those songs. It’s like trying to get past k.d. lang singing Orbison’s “Crying”, or for that matter, Bonnie Raitt trying her hand at “You Got It”. Other than that detail, though, this is one hell of an album. I highly recommend it for any Projectiles out there. The choice of songs is surprising in many places, and refreshing since it doesn’t always represent those tunes that oversaturated the radio airwaves in the late 70s and early 80s. Also surprising is that nearly every Project album is represented 
A dandy bit of conceptual rock opera from the same people who brought you the Alan Parsons Project, sans Eric Woolfson who departed after a divergence of music careers following the Freudiana album. As with the Project, Parsons only produces though the music seems to be attributed to him. This is an uneven collection, though it does kick off with the darkly humorous “The Three of Me”, an ode to schizophrenia with a speaker-blowing orchestral intro reminiscent of the Project’s best 1970s work. The sole single from this album, rock anthem “Turn It Up”, as well as the superior “Back Against the Wall”, feature lead vocals from Manfred Mann’s Chris Thompson. Three other songs deserve special notice – “Siren Song”, “Wine From the Water” (whose keyboards sound like they’ve time-warped into the song straight from the mid 70s), and “I’m