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Description:
Originally produced for cable and home video as a documentary project, the Classic Albums series offers in-depth profiles of enduring rock and pop albums built around first-person interviews with the artists, producers, and musicians who created them. The profile of Steely Dan's elegant 1977 masterpiece, Aja, is a feast for Dan fans, a thoughtful, satisfyingly detailed assessment of the album and its bejeweled fusion of jazz, R&B, rock, and pop. Better yet, the documentary's producers elicit atypically straightforward, revealing interviews from the group's principals, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who jettison enough of their signature sarcasm to touch on the autobiographical threads, cultural anomie, and serious musical ambition audible in their work. U2's The Joshua Tree produced several hit singles, including "With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," both of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100. The story of the making of this classic album is told through archival film footage and interviews with band members Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, as well as long-time manager Paul McGuinness. Phil Collins himself provides the bulk of the insightful commentary about Face Value. From his home studio, he discusses how the lyrics to "In the Air Tonight" wrote themselves after his painful divorce and why a drummer would ever use a drum machine. Also interviewed are Genesis colleagues Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, and many of the studio musicians. Songs such as "Behind the Lines," "I Missed Again," and of course "In the Air Tonight" are excerpted in both home and concert footage (some of it previously unreleased), and Collins accompanies himself at the piano in a wrenching "Please Don't Ask," which was cut from the album.
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