This song always had sentimental value to me. Of course, it was the third single off of the Alan Parsons Project's fantastic Eye in the Sky album from 1982. And with it being Halloween (or Samhain), the subject matter of facing one's own mortality seems to ring true here. This song's lyrics are very haunting.
Well, when fellow blogger Dreamtime came up with their own extended mix for the title track off this fantastic album, I felt I had to contribute my two cents in. So this is my result ... to explain, it helps to know a bit about the Alan Parsons Project and how they operated musically.
The Project had a habit of bringing in outside vocalists (besides core member Eric Woolfson of course) to sing their songs, and a vocalist named Colin Blunstone does an awesome job on this one. On many occasions Eric Woolfson (who was the Project's in-house vocalist) contributed to the majority of the Project's biggest hits, including of course "Time" (which I have extended mixed on this blog) and "Eye in the Sky". Well, I did some searching, and it turns out that there was a demo version of this song, with the same instrumentation, but with Eric Woolfson singing the lead vocals instead! This gave me an intriguing idea ...
The mix features both versions of the song, Colin's and Eric's. Colin starts off singing for the first half of the mix, then after his last verse, there is a nice crossfade over into Eric's version, which is more stripped down and only has piano, drums, and bass, before a final crossfade and flange into the terrific ending with an awesome saxophone solo.
This mix clocks in at a glorious 8 minutes and 39 seconds.
