Award Winning Composer/Lyricist Eric Woolfson Dies of Cancer at 64

Award-winning Composer, lyricist and writer Eric Woolfson died from cancer in the early hours of the 2nd December 2009, at age 64.

Woolfson was the creator and writer (and often lead singer) of the ten Alan Parsons Project albums. Since then, he has written five stage musicals: Dancing Shadows, POE, Gambler, Gaudi, and Freudiana, which have been performed world-wide. 

In 1975, Woolfson joined forces with record producer Alan Parsons who was a recording engineer on many Beatles and Paul McCartney albums as well as having engineered Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. The Alan Parsons Project was born, the name originally being intended as a Working Title for their collaborative project. From 1976 to 1987, Woolfson and Parsons collaborated on the conception and lyrics for all ten albums by The Alan Parsons Project, which have achieved world-wide sales in excess of 40 million.

On every Project album, Woolfson would sing a guide vocal track for each song, which the album's eventual lead vocalists would use as a reference. Some of these tracks can be heard on the new remastered editions of various Project albums released in 2007. Woolfson himself was the actual singer on many of the Project's biggest hits, such as "Time", "Don't Answer Me" and the band's signature tune "Eye in the Sky", which spent severAl Weeks in the Top 3 of Billboard's Hot 100 in 1982.

After landing two single on the British charts with the Alan Parsons Project, Woolfson explained of his career switch into musical theater during a 2004 interview:

"I eventually developed The Alan Parsons Project as a vehicle but then I realised that there was more to it than that and that Andrew Lloyd Webber was right and that the stage musical was a fulfilling media for a writer like myself. I got into stage musicals in the mid-eighties." His musicals are mainly performed in Germany. This was for two reasons: The Alan Parsons Project was well known in Germany, and at that time the arts were very well funded there." 

Freudiana, about Sigmund Freud, premiered in Vienna in 1990 The success of this first work led to Woolfson's second musical Gaudi (concerning the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi) (1995), which ran for over five years in several German productions. Gambler, Woolfson's third musical also premiered in Germany in 1996 and had a first run of over 500 performances. Gambler has had five productions in Korea, one of which also toured Japan in 2002 (the first time a Korean language production had been staged in this way). A fourth musical Edgar Allan Poe, based on the life of the author, was given a demonstration prduction at Abbey Road studios, London in 2003.

Dancing with Shadows (based on the anti-war play Forest Fire by the Korean playwright Cham Bum-Suk and with a book by Ariel Dorfman) was premiered in July 2007 in Korea.

To access his musical library visit www.ericwoolfsonmusic.com.

 

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