Songoftheday 7/11/12 - Don't think sorry's easily said, don't try turning tables instead...

The Alan Parsons Project - "Eye In The Sky"
from the album Eye In The Sky (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (three weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 17

Today's Song of the Day is by prog-rock studio act the Alan Parsons Project, whose namesake started as an engineer on some classic albums such as the Beatles' Abbey Road and Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. Along with singer/songwriter Eric Woolfson, as well as bands Ambrosia and Pilot, Parsons' released an album based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe called Tales Of Mystery and Imagination in 1976. From that work a left-field top-40 hit was spawned with "(The System of) Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether". The followup LP, I Robot, again taking inspiration from literature (this time sci-fi god Isaac Asimov) did even better, becoming a top-10 album. In 1980, the collective (now with studio musicians along with Woolfson and Parsons) recorded Turn Of A Friendly Card, a gambling concept album, that scored on pop radio with two top-20 hits - "Games People Play" and "Time".

In 1982, the Project released Eye In The Sky, and the title song, an eerie Orwellian one, became their biggest success, peaking at #3 for a month on the pop charts...

The song also made the same rank on the adult-contemporary chart, as well as #11 on the rock radio list. The corresponding album also was their biggest, peaking at #7 and selling over a million copies. On the album, the song is preceded/mixed with an instrumental called "Sirius", which became the theme for the Chicago Bulls basketball team in their heydey. The group would continue to have a couple more pop hits, but segue back into more of an album-rock act, before differences split Parsons and Woolfson, who sadly died in 2009. There hasn't been a proper APP album since 1987's Gaudi.

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Peruvian-American rapper Immortal Technique co-opted the Parsons' track for a song of the same title in 2011..