Jordan: The Comeback is the fifth studio album by English pop band Prefab Sprout, released by Kitchenware Records and CBS on 28 August 1990. A 19-track album encompassing a variety of musical styles and themes, Jordan has been considered by the band and critics alike to be Prefab Sprout's most ambitious project. The album was produced by Thomas Dolby, who had helmed the band's acclaimed 1985 album Steve McQueen but had been unable to commit to the entirety of its 1988 follow-up From Langley Park to Memphis.
Frontman Paddy McAloon divided the album thematically into four segments – straight pop material, a suite about Elvis Presley, love songs and a section on "death and fate". Often touching upon religion and celebrity, the songs allude to figures including Jesse James, Agnetha Fältskog, God and the Devil. Upon release, the album received widespread acclaim. It was also a commercial success, peaking at number 7 on the UK Albums Chart. The album's singles were less successful – "Looking for Atlantis" and "We Let the Stars Go" peaked at number 51 and number 50, respectively, on the UK Singles Chart while Jordan: The EP peaked at number 35. The album was nominated for Brit Award for British Album of the Year at the 1991 Brit Awards.
Background and recording
Following the release of the successful From Langley Park to Memphis (1988), frontman Paddy McAloon spent around a year writing and recording demos for Prefab Sprout's next album. He created home recordings more elaborate than those for previous albums and wished for the project to resemble a Disney movie soundtrack produced by Trevor Horn. McAloon kept in contact with collaborator Thomas Dolby, described by Giles Smith of The Independent as "a producer who works from a sound-library of other-wordly squeaks and shimmers". When Dolby received a demo tape, he considered many of the songs so complete that there was little he could do to improve them. McAloon, however, felt strongly that the album needed to be made in a professional recording studio. He ultimately considered Dolby's contribution in the studio so great that, barring a few tracks, he was a de facto band member on the album.
Recording commenced in June 1989, with the album title announced the same month in the press release for Protest Songs. The band – Paddy and Martin McAloon, Wendy Smith and Neil Conti – initially recorded at Ridge Farm Studio, Surrey. Paddy McAloon began the sessions having already carefully planned the album's running order in the demo stage. He intended the album to feature 24 songs but CBS were concerned about the commercial appeal of a double album. Compromising, Prefab Sprout took the standard advance for a single album and recorded 19 tracks. The subsequent budgetary issues placed a strain on recording; the sessions, intended to last three months, ultimately stretched to around a year and caused Dolby to be away from his wife Kathleen Beller. After six months, the band travelled to Los Angeles to continue recording the album, with the couple putting them up at their home. Dolby and McAloon mixed the completed album in a small L.A. studio.
Musical and lyrical style Jordan: The Comeback has been described as "nineteen songs dipped in conceptual aspic". The album's tracklisting can be divided into four sections – straightforward pop songs, songs concerning Elvis Presley, love songs and songs about "death and fate". Common to all four sections is the theme of rebirth and renewal, the "comeback" of the album's title. McAloon felt most people "would like to be able to go back and do things differently". Several songs on the album contain references to God and religious imagery, a feature present in some of the band's earlier work. McAloon was inspired by the power of gospel music and concepts from his youth in a Catholic seminary. He felt his own agnosticism lent a tension to his work.
The album features a variety of genres, among them funk, disco, country and bolero. McAloon took inspiration from K-tel compilation albums, attracted to the idea of "the listener being inundated with all these musical styles coming at them one after another". The arrangements largely employ soft textures, something McAloon deemed "the most avant-garde thing you can do" amidst the rock music scene of 1990. According to the Gavin Report, "ever present are the rich chord changes with slices of sly sampling". Stuart Maconie of the NME considered the album's sound world "informed more by Pet Sounds and Phil Spector than punk rock or acid house" and felt its tracks exhibited "a tension between a love of the mainstream pop song tradition and McAloon's own unusual musical personality". Many of the compositions carry the influence of Broadway theatre and McAloon found inspiration in songwriters including Rodgers and Hart, Burt Bacharach and Rod Temperton. Writing in 2022, John Earls of Classic Pop considered the album to be Prefab Sprout's most "band-sounding", remarking "Martin McAloon and drummer Neil Conti's rhythm section were never so fluid."
Songs Tracks 1–5 The first five tracks on the album are straightforward pop songs with no deliberate linking theme. "Looking for Atlantis" is based around McAloon's nylon string Ibanez guitar and atypically uses only two chords. McAloon has summarised the song's sentiment as "stop wasting time, find someone and fall in love with them". McAloon considered the hip hop-influenced "Wild Horses" to be one of the album's best songs. Lyrically, it is written from the point of view of "the older man longing for the younger girl, without it being seedy". He initially contemplated sending the song for Daryl Hall's consideration. The actress Jenny Agutter recorded the spoken words that accompany the song's instrumental section.
"Machine Gun Ibiza" utilises funk rhythms and wah-wah guitar in an arrangement Time Out compared to the work of Sly Stone. The song originated in a pub conversation referencing both Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun" and Ibiza, and lyrically concerns a hero partly based on Hendrix and described by McAloon as "the coolest guy on the planet". The character is referred to as "a top rollmo star" – 'rollmo' being a word McAloon dreamt Michael Jackson taught him. The ballad "We Let the Stars Go" was composed on piano on the morning of 29 August 1988; McAloon had tickets to see Jackson in Leeds that day but ultimately didn't go. The song's features the name "Paddy Joe" in reference to McAloon's own given names Patrick Joseph. He has described it as "a boy-loses-girl song with a little bit of autobiographical detail thrown in". "Carnival 2000" is about the celebrating the turn of the Millennium. The song began as a simple piano piece before being worked up into a samba-inspired production at the insistence of Dolby.
Tracks 6–9 (Elvis) Tracks six through nine constitute what McAloon called "the Elvis section" as all four songs were written for or about Elvis Presley. "Jordan: The Comeback" imagines Presley, who died in 1977, still alive and living a reclusive existence in the Nevada desert. He has become distant from rock and roll and is waiting for the right song to return with. McAloon described "Jordan: The Comeback" as "a kind of mini-musical where the pumping bass is both Elvis's hip work and the throbbing of convertibles on endless highways." The verses follow Presley's thoughts (delivered in a Southern drawl) over music intended to sound like a Las Vegas band, while the chorus serves as the spiritual song he returns with ("End of the road I'm travelling, I will see Jordan beckoning"). McAloon chose the River Jordan as the subject of the chorus because he believed Presley felt closest to gospel in his last years. He described the river as a "place of resurrection" and linked it to Presley through his backing vocalists, the Jordanaires.
"Jesse James Symphony" and "Jesse James Bolero" came from McAloon's desire to write something Presley might have chosen to record. He felt the singer might have identified with the American outlaw Jesse James and "the pathetic story of a young life wasted". The two songs draw a parallel between the lives and early deaths of the two figures; McAloon felt both "lived a certain kind of life, and maybe envisaged a better end to it than what happened". Jesse was the name of Elvis's stillborn twin brother, another link identified by McAloon. He considered the genre of bolero fitting as it is "a stately dance, but a stately dance going nowhere". "Moon Dog" imagines Colonel Tom Parker staging Presley's surprise comeback concert on the moon ("Guess who's on the moon / Up there a flag will fly for mom and apple pie"). The track samples applause from one of Presley's concerts.
Tracks 10–14 (Love songs) Tracks ten through fourteen broadly make up a section of love songs. The upbeat "All the World Loves Lovers" concerns a new relationship with an ambiguous tone influenced by the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim. McAloon spoke of a desire to hear the song covered by Frank Sinatra. The only lyric in "All Boys Believe Anything" is a repetition of the title, a backronym of ABBA. The song has been likened to those from musical theatre by several reviewers. Described as a "stop-start pop track with flourishes of brass", "The Ice Maiden" is about ABBA member Agnetha Fältskog. Having been struck by the Swedish pop group's "frosty glamour" as a teenager, McAloon sought to emulate ABBA's "stiff" lyrical style with lines including "welcome to the glow of high octane affairs" and "standing on the boulevard, you wish to know my name". "Paris Smith" was inspired by Wendy Smith's admission that, if she were to have a child, she'd give it an incongruous name to play against her surname. Wendy's choice for a girl was Paris. The song lyrically addresses a child in what McAloon described as "an attempt to exorcise my fears for the future". The music is sparse, with a Dimension D chorus effect on the lead vocal (a feature carried over from the demo). "The Wedding March" concerns marriage, with the lyrics declaring matrimony "one dance whose steps I never could learn". McAloon preferred the song's demo to the studio recording and described the song as "lyrically quite hard" despite the mellow musical backing and backing vocals he compared to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
Tracks 15–19 (Death and fate)
Dubbed "death and fate" in several interviews, McAloon described the album's last five tracks as "a section on the modern way of death" that deals with "fundamental questions". Stuart Maconie has described the suite as "a rosary of agnostic doubt and weirdly uplifting musings on death" that "may be the most intelligent take on spiritual matters that modern pop has produced." Three of the tracks – "One of the Broken", "Mercy" and "Doo Wop in Harlem" – were written by McAloon in a flash of inspiration whilst he was waiting for a reel-to-reel tape to rewind.