The Sorcerer Of Sound
“CONCEPT ALBUMS ARE, OF COURSE, CONSIDERED OLD HAT THESE DAYS, BUT I MADE A CAREER OUT OF IT AND I DON’T SEE WHY I SHOULD STOP NOW.”
It’s the morning after Alan Parsons has just returned home to Santa Barbara, California, from being out on the road with the Alan Parsons Live Project and he’s understandably a little husky talking to Prog. Yet the road weariness can’t mask his enthusiasm to have new music to talk about. A decade and a half after his last studio release, A Valid Path from 2004, Parsons is poised to release a brand-new album, The Secret. The long gap between releases stems from “no better reason than not having a record deal”, says Parsons, who was approached by Serafino Perugino of Frontiers Music to make an album. “He’s kind of been hunting me down to get me to agree to do a record for him for a number of years. I haven’t made an album in 15 years, so suddenly in came an offer from Frontiers in Italy and I started assembling the necessary talent, the necessary songs and so on.”
Along with pulling in his live band and some famous friends (more. “It’s not actually in my house, it’s on my property,” he says. “I live on a fairly extensive avocado ranch and there was a lovely space available by extending an existing building. It was a generator house originally, it housed two big generators, and it’s now a full-blown studio with a brand-new Neve analogue desk and the latest Pro Tools. I’m delighted with the sound. It’s just a good, modern acoustic design and the console of my dreams. It’s wonderful.”
