Let’s Talk About Me

You are parked on The Zoo, the station that still believes a record can open a door if you let the needle do the talking. Pull up a chair for “Let’s Talk About Me,” the track that kicks open Vulture Culture, the eighth studio album from The Alan Parsons Project. Arista put the album out in February 1985 after sessions at Abbey Road in London running May through July of 1984, and the single itself hit the street on January 11, 1985, with the instrumental “Hawkeye” riding the flip. Four minutes and twenty-nine seconds, written by Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons, produced by Parsons, and sung by the man who was already holding down the bass chair, David Paton of Pilot fame. If you came in looking for a guest-star vocalist from the American session circuit, you took a wrong turn. This one belongs to Paton, and he sings it like a man who has spent one conversation too many listening to somebody else’s problems.

The lyric is a clean little knife. Let’s talk about me for a minute. How do you think I feel about what’s been going on? Let’s talk about dreams I never learned to read. Let’s talk about you and your problems, because that is all I seem to do, and no matter what I say I cannot get it right. Woolfson aimed the song at the Me generation, the culture of the monologue, the friend who never asks a question because the mirror is already full. Then the track does something only this band would try. Over the top of the arrangement sits a spoken rant credited on the sleeve to Mr. Laser Beam. That is not a synthesizer preset. Mr. Laser Beam is an anagram of Lee Abrams, the radio programmer who happened to be at dinner with the band in a London restaurant and launched into what Woolfson later called a ten-minute party piece, a rant on any subject you cared to name, complete with an air-traffic-controller routine. Somebody had a Sony Walkman running. Pieces of that tape were cut into the record. Abrams is in the song the way a heckler is in a club, and the lyric answers him by demanding the floor back.

The band around Paton is the Project’s working core. Ian Bairnson on guitar, Stuart Elliott on drums, Eric Woolfson on piano, Richard Cottle on synthesizer, Chris Rainbow on the backing vocals that stack the hook until it feels like a small choir arguing with itself. Parsons engineered and produced, which on a Project record is not a credit so much as the architecture. Analog multitrack at Abbey Road, mixed to Sony 1610 digital, the kind of hybrid that defined the middle eighties for a man who had already spent a decade proving that a control room could be an instrument. The video, directed by Ron Jacobs and produced by Jon Small Productions, plays the lyric as a domestic scene, a woman losing patience with a husband who cannot stop talking about himself. The record does not need the picture. The groove is choppy, the guitar has weight, and the vocal sits in that Supertramp-and-Yes neighborhood reviewers kept mentioning, bright, slightly theatrical, and impossible to mistake for anybody else on the dial.

Radio took it. In the United States the song was one of the most-added titles at album-rock stations for the week of February 1, 1985, then crossed to contemporary hit radio. It peaked at number 56 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 10 on the Billboard rock tracks chart. Canada’s RPM list saw it at 89. Overseas it did better business. Number 32 in West Germany, where Vulture Culture itself went to number one. Number 21 in Switzerland, where the album reached number two. Number 31 on the Dutch Top 40 and number 40 on the Dutch singles chart. Number 6 in Spain, where it ranked among the most-played songs of the stretch. European airplay charts had it at 31, the European Hot 100 at 50. Not a “Eye in the Sky” sized hit, and nobody at Arista pretended it was. It was the door-opener for an album whose first side is four tight pop songs and whose second side wanders from the funk of the title track, sung by Lenny Zakatek, through the bounce of “Hawkeye,” into Colin Blunstone on “Somebody Out There” and Woolfson again on “The Same Old Sun.” Side one also holds “Separate Lives” and “Sooner or Later,” both Woolfson leads, and “Days Are Numbers (The Traveller),” which belongs to Chris Rainbow and became the follow-up single. Cashbox heard high-tech pop from a master craftsman. AllMusic later groused that the choppy rhythm undercut the song. Both takes can live in the same headphones.

To get why a record like this exists, you have to go back to the man whose name is on the door. Alan Parsons was born in London on December 20, 1948, and came up through the tape library and the assistant’s chair at Abbey Road. He assisted on Beatles sessions, including Abbey Road and Let It Be, then engineered Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, the record that taught a generation what a studio could do with space, clocks, and a heartbeat. Engineering credits piled up with Pilot, Al Stewart, Ambrosia, and Cockney Rebel. In 1975 he met Eric Woolfson, the Scottish songwriter, pianist, and manager who had the idea of a studio project built like a film, themes instead of a fixed frontman, guest singers instead of a single voice. The Alan Parsons Project was never a touring band in those years. It was a writing desk and a control room. Tales of Mystery and Imagination, drawn from Edgar Allan Poe, arrived in 1976. I Robot followed in 1977, Pyramid in 1978, Eve in 1979, The Turn of a Friendly Card in 1980, Eye in the Sky in 1982, Ammonia Avenue in 1984, then Vulture Culture, then Stereotomy and Gaudi. Andrew Powell arranged and conducted. The singers rotated: Paton, Zakatek, Blunstone, Rainbow, Woolfson himself, and a bench of others. The through-line was Parsons at the desk and Woolfson at the piano and the lyric sheet.

Woolfson died in December 2009. After the Project wound down he had turned toward musical theatre, with stage works that reused songs from the albums. Parsons took the catalog on the road in the nineties with a live band and has kept recording under his own name, still the engineer who thinks like a composer. The Project’s own pages, and Parsons’ pages, still treat the old records as a living catalog rather than a museum. If you want the long version of the story, the official Project site is the place to start, at the-alan-parsons-project.com, and Parsons’ own site sits at alanparsons.com. The social rooms are active too: Facebook at facebook.com/TheAlanParsonsProject, Instagram at instagram.com/officialalanparsonsproject, and X at x.com/TheOfficialAPP. The long-running fan letter from Toronto, The Avenue, still keeps the discography and the old correspondence at theavenueonline.info.

“Let’s Talk About Me” is not the Project’s biggest single, and it does not need to be. It is a sharp little essay about the cost of a one-way conversation, cut at the studio where Parsons learned the trade, sung by the bass player, and interrupted by a radio man who did not know he was about to become a character on the record. That is the kind of deep cut The Zoo was built to keep in rotation. More of the catalog, and the rest of the freeform rock shift, lives at thezoorocks.com. Stay with it.