Eye in the Sky (album)


Eye in the Sky is the sixth studio album by English rock band The Alan Parsons Project, released in June 1982 by Arista Records. At the 25th Annual Grammy Awards in 1983, Eye in the Sky was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album. In 2019, the album won the Grammy Award for Best Immersive Audio Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards.

Production

Eye in the Sky is the first of three albums the Project recorded on analogue equipment and mixed directly to the digital master tape.

Release

Eye in the Sky was the last platinum record in the United States from the band.
Eye in the Sky contains the Project's biggest hit, the title track with lead vocals by Eric Woolfson. The album itself was a major success, reaching the Top 10 in numerous countries.
The album features the instrumental piece "Sirius", which has become a staple of many college and professional sporting arenas throughout North America. It is best known for its use by the Chicago Bulls to introduce its starting line-up during its championship years of the 1990s.
On 1 December 2017, a 35th-anniversary-edition box set of the album was released, for which Alan Parsons, along with surround mastering engineers Dave Donnelly and PJ Olsson, won the Grammy Award for Best Immersive Audio Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards.

Reception

From contemporary reviews, Ken Tucker of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the album a one star rating out of five rating, calling it a "hopelessly banal album" with "Paul McCartney-as-manic-depressive melodies and whining vocals would be merely pathetic were it not for Parsons' lyric pretensions".
From retrospective reviews, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave the album a four and a half star rating, stating that "this is a soft rock album through and through, one that's about melodic hooks and texture." noting that "with the exception of those instrumentals and the galloping suite "Silence and I," all the artiness was part of the idea of this album was pushed into the lyrics, so the album plays as soft pop album -- and a very, very good one at that it adds up to arguably the most consistent Alan Parsons Project album -- perhaps not in terms of concept, but in terms of music they never were as satisfying as they were here."

Track listing

Personnel

YearChartPosition
1982The Billboard 2007
1982UK Albums Chart27
1982Canada3
1982New Zealand3
1982Norway3
1982Germany1
1982Spain 1

Certifications and sales