Fine Tuneage

pretty much the whole catalogue with a few exceptions

The Father of My Unborn Children is a musician, so is it ironic that an interview on his book tour put me back in touch with my musical history? He did a session in the Google Authors series while promoting his most-excellent autobiography, and during the Q&A, he admitted to a fondness for the old vinyl LP. He still owns a vast collection (and clearly hires someone else to do the heavy lifting when relocating it) though, naturally, he doesn’t listen to everything as frequently as he once did. He likened it to a vintage wine collection, when something is opened and savoured as the mood dictates. After he’s done with whichever Bowie or Roxy album, it goes back into storage for a few years, until he feels like hearing it again.

Most of the vinyl I owned was sent to consignment as I converted to compact discs; the medium is less important to me than the content, so if an LP made it to my CD case, it was a keeper.

During my recent bout of “writing is not meant to happen”, I rediscovered my joy in the Alan Parsons Project. Rightly or wrongly, I associate my sizeable collection of their work with my younger older brother, who introduced me to the concept of orchestrated rock and album-oriented FM radio when I was a teenager. I vividly recall the instance when he started his car and “Hyper Gamma Spaces” (an instrumental from 1977’s “Pyramid”) poured from the souped-up speakers, but I’m sure he had me hooked before then. In any event, I became a fan, collected all the APP albums I could find, and have revisited them in sequence over the past few weeks. And I’ve loved it—so much that it finally occurred to me that there might be a website.

Alas, the Project broke up and co-founder Eric Woolfson passed away in 2009, but Alan Parsons himself continues to produce and record new material. His website is now bookmarked and I am trying to get over the fact that “I Robot” (my favourite after “The Turn of a Friendly Card”) has just been remastered, expanded, and re-released in a 35^th anniversary edition! 35 years? Really? Playing it last week, I closed my eyes and was immediately transported to the couch in my parents’ living room, flaked out in one corner with my older older brother in the other, both of us floating on the groove of the LP’s first release. The memory was so clear that it couldn’t have been that long ago … could it?

The studio technology, so sparkly and new at the time, is dated and sounds a little clunky nowadays, but the albums themselves remain a magical link to my past, to time shared with both of my brothers, and my own visions of a creative future. Now that I’ve heard them all again, back to the wine cellar they go, to be opened and enjoyed again some time down the road.