The Best of The Alan Parsons Project Volume 2
	Previously released material
	Released on 1987
	no chart information
	Find it at GEMM
AL-8486 cover [high resolution scan]

K RONOMYTH 12.0: SPARSE AND PRODUCT. Trust me, where greatest hits are concerned, you don’t want to be number 2. Ask Bowie, Tull or Elton fans if you don’t believe me. The first hits compilation is a banquet, a feast, and then the Label makes the mistake of inviting everybody back for leftovers. The Best of APP Volume 2 has the dubious distinction of being the first Parsons album not to chart; not even 2 with 2 zeros after it. Gaudi was hardly out when someone got greedy and pushed this into an unAPPy market. Honestly, only the tracks from Ammonia Avenue (“Don’t Answer Me,” “Prime Time,” “Ammonia Avenue”) and the instrumental “I Robot” represent the best of Alan Parsons Project. Vulture Culture, Stereotomy and Gaudi marked a decline in product that no one needed to commemorate. Yet Arista felt compelled to trot out tracks from each of them anyway and fill in the gaps with some classic album cuts (“What Goes Up...,” “The Turn of a Friendly Card, Part 2”) that missed the first feast. In an unusual move, Arista released very different versions of the album in the US and UK, dubbing the second Limelight but using the identical album cover. The two albums share only five tracks in common, with the UK version omitting anything from Gaudi and including two more tracks from Eye In The Sky (“Mammagamma,” “Silence And I”). Don’t ask me why, the UK release is also missing the band’s highest-charting UK hit, “Don’t Answer Me.” Since we live in an age that has decided to parcel out an artist’s back catalog in ninety-nine-cent mcsingles, listeners can handily best Arista’s work for less money ($10.89) and look up the lyrics online. Any discussion of this release today should be relegated to its role as product and the temporal window of 1987, where by most metrics it hardly fogged up the glass.

AL-8486 back cover	AL-8486 lyric sleeve

TRACK LISTING

1. PRIME TIME    3:48
2. LET'S TALK ABOUT ME    3:37
3. STANDING ON HIGHER GROUND    4:22
4. STEREOTOMY    4:26
5. DON'T ANSWER ME    4:10
6. LIMELIGHT    4:38
7. I ROBOT    6:00
8. WHAT GOES UP...    3:24
9. DAYS ARE NUMBERS (THE TRAVELLER)    4:08
10. AMMONIA AVENUE    6:32
11. THE TURN OF A FRIENDLY CARD (PART II)    3:20
    
    LIMELIGHT track listing
    
1. LIMELIGHT
2. THE SAME OLD SUN
3. AMMONIA AVENUE
4. MAMMAGAMMA
5. SINCE THE LAST GOODBYE
6. I ROBOT
7. PRIME TIME
8. HAWKEYE
9. THE TURN OF A FRIENDLY CARD
10. SILENCE AND I
    
    All songs written by Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons

CREDITS

Maude Gilman -- art direction
Jeff Atherton -- photography

return to THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT discography

A SITE BETTER

In researching (okay, in the fifteen minutes of Googling) the different versions of this album, I was reintroduced to the online version of the APP fanzine, The Avenue. Anyway, great site with a ton of cool info; you should spend more than 15 minutes on it.

For more discographies visit...

© 2009 Connolly & Company. All rights reserved.