Alan Parsons

Alan Parsons OBE (born 20 December 1948) is an English audio engineer, songwriter, musician, singer and record producer.

Parsons was the sound engineer on albums including the Beatles' Abbey Road (1969) and Let It Be (1970), Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and the eponymous debut album by Ambrosia in 1975. Parsons's own group, The Alan Parsons Project, as well as his subsequent solo recordings, have also been commercially successful. He has been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, with his first win occurring in 2019 for Best Immersive Audio Album for Eye in the Sky (35th Anniversary Edition).

After getting a job working in the tape duplication department at EMI, Parsons heard the master tape for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and decided to try talking his way into a job at Abbey Road Studios. In October 1967, at the age of 18, Parsons went to work as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road. He was a tape operator during the Beatles' Get Back sessions, and he earned his first credit on the LP Abbey Road. He became a regular there, engineering projects such as Wings' Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, five albums by the Hollies and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), for which he received his first Grammy Awards nomination.

"It was a bit of a frustration for me that I didn't get all the engineering credit", Parsons said of Dark Side of the Moon, "because Chris came in as mixing supervisor … I had been working on the album for a year and I obviously knew it inside-out by the mixing stage … There were times when I thought Chris was wrong, particularly about the use of limiting and compression on the mix, which I've never been a fan of … Although, later, I got the opportunity to mix the album the way I wanted when I did the quadraphonic version."

In his work with Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat", Parsons added the saxophone part and transformed the original folk concept into the jazz-influenced ballad that put Stewart onto the charts.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.