- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- I Robot is the band’s second album; like their debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe (1976), the record has a literary theme.
The Alan Parsons Project – I Robot (1977): Alan Parsons is a renowned British record producer and sound engineer who worked on albums by Pink Floyd and the Beatles, among many others. In 1975, he founded the Alan Parsons Project with songwriter Eric Woolfson; backed by a succession of studio musicians, they crafted a series of progressive-rock concept albums over the next dozen years. I Robot is the band’s second album; like their debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe (1976), the record has a literary theme: I, Robot (1950) is a group of short stories and essays written by science fiction legend Isaac Asimov between 1940 and 1950 that were then loosely linked together as a novel. Asimov’s famous “Three Laws of Robotics” were first laid out in I, Robot, and the work was later freely adapted into a highly entertaining Will Smith movie also called I, Robot (2004).
The Alan Parsons Project took a novel approach with their music, in that they created soft rock rather than the often abrasive hard rock that marks most of the progressive rock genre. The Alan Parsons Project had their greatest success with their 1982 album Eye in the Sky, but I Robot (the album name omits the comma used in the novel and movie) includes their first Top Ten hit, “I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You”. With regard to the last song, “Genesis Ch. 1, V. 32”, there are only 31 verses in the first chapter of Genesis.