The Alan Parsons Project were a British rock band active between 1975 and 1990, whose core membership consisted of producer, audio engineer, musician and composer Alan Parsons and singer, songwriter and pianist Eric Woolfson. They were accompanied by varying session musicians and some relatively consistent session players such as guitarist Ian Bairnson, arranger Andrew Powell, bassist and vocalist David Paton, drummer Stuart Elliott, and vocalists Lenny Zakatek and Chris Rainbow. Parsons and Woolfson shared writing credits on almost all of the Project's songs, with Parsons producing or co-producing all of the band's recordings.
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843. It is told by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of the narrator's sanity while simultaneously describing a murder the narrator committed. The victim was an old man with a filmy pale blue "vulture-eye", as the narrator calls it. The narrator emphasizes the careful calculation of the murder, attempting the perfect crime, complete with dismembering the body in the bathtub and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately, the narrator's actions result in hearing a thumping sound, which the narrator interprets as the dead man's beating heart.
Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe) is the debut studio album by British rock band the Alan Parsons Project. It was released on 25 June 1976 in the United Kingdom by Charisma Records and 20th Century Fox Records in the U.S. The lyrical and musical themes of the album, which are retellings of horror stories and poetry by Edgar Allan Poe, attracted a cult audience. The title of the album is taken from the title of a collection of Poe's macabre stories of the same name.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
Le ChevalierC. Auguste Dupin is a fictional character created by Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", widely considered the first detective fiction story. He reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).
Eric Norman Woolfson was a Scottish songwriter, lyricist, vocalist, executive producer, pianist, and co-creator of the band the Alan Parsons Project, who sold over 50 million albums worldwide. Woolfson also pursued a career in musical theatre.
"The Bells" is a heavily onomatopoeic poem by Edgar Allan Poe which was not published until after his death in 1849. It is perhaps best known for the diacopic use of the word "bells". The poem has four parts to it; each part becomes darker and darker as the poem progresses from "the jingling and the tinkling" of the bells in part 1 to the "moaning and the groaning" of the bells in part 4.
Steve Balsamo is a Welsh singer and songwriter, best known for playing the lead role in the West End revival productions of Jesus Christ Superstar during the mid-1990s. He performs as a member of several bands and is also a successful songwriter. He is also on Eric Woolfson's sixth solo album, Poe: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 2003, on which he provides the vocals for eight songs.
"The Raven" is a narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
"A Dream Within a Dream" is a poem written by American poet Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1849. The poem has 24 lines, divided into two stanzas.
"(The System of) Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" is a 1976 single by the Alan Parsons Project. It first appeared on their debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe. The single reached number 37 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and number 62 in Canada.
"The Raven" is the first song by the Alan Parsons Project, recorded in April 1976 at Mama Jo's Studio, North Hollywood, Los Angeles. It is the second track on their debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which is a tribute to author and poet Edgar Allan Poe. Though the song is based on Poe's poem of the same name, and is almost a verbatim recital of the lyrics of the poem, Poe is not given song writing credit. It is credited to Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson.
The Best of the Alan Parsons Project is a 1983 greatest hits compilation by the Alan Parsons Project. In addition, it contained a new song "You Don't Believe", which would be included on the next Project album, Ammonia Avenue. In 1986, it had become the first album of the group to be released in the Soviet Union, although the song "Psychobabble" was removed from it. No songs from Tales of Mystery and Imagination were included, presumably because that album had not been released through Arista.
The Tell-Tale Heart is an 1843 short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Tales of Mystery & Imagination is a popular title for posthumous compilations of writings by American author, essayist and poet Edgar Allan Poe and was the first complete collection of his works specifically restricting itself to his suspenseful and related tales.
Eric Woolfson sings The Alan Parsons Project That Never Was is an album by the progressive rock musician Eric Woolfson, co-creator with Alan Parsons of The Alan Parsons Project, as well as main songwriter and manager of the band. Released in 2009, this was Woolfson's final album before he died of cancer in December of that year. The album includes songs that remained unreleased since the Project time for various reasons; however, as Woolfson himself remarks in the booklet, Parsons' dislike for some of Woolfson's compositions would have often caused them to be excluded from a Project album in its very early stages - such as, for example, "Steal Your Heart Away", an "unashamedly commercial" song with a conventionally sentimental lyric, which Parsons, in Woolfson's words, would have absolutely detested. "Somewhere in the Audience" and "Immortal" are slightly re-arranged and re-recorded versions of two of Woolfson's demos for his 2003 musical about Edgar Allan Poe; the final versions of these songs, sung by the musical's protagonist Steve Balsamo, are featured on the album Poe: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination. "Train to Wuxi" was the original version of "Train to Freedom", which is also included in the Poe musical and features Woolfson's one and only guitar solo.
Poe: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination is an album by Eric Woolfson. It contains some, but not all, of the songs from his musical Edgar Allan Poe.
Tales of Mystery and Imagination may refer to:
"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" is a short-story by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). It was published in the February 1845 issue of Godey's Lady's Book and was intended as a partly humorous sequel to the celebrated collection of Middle Eastern tales One Thousand and One Nights.
Alan Parsons Live is the first live album by Alan Parsons, recorded in May 1994 during his European tour, and released late that year by Arcade Records in Europe. RCA/BMG added three new studio tracks and changed the cover art when releasing the album in the rest of the world in 1995, renaming it The Very Best Live; stylized on the cover with "The Very Best" in a smaller font between Alan Parsons and Live. Despite the tour promoting Try Anything Once with seven songs from the album in the setlist, the live performances on the album are all songs from his years with The Alan Parsons Project.
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