The Doors The Soft Parade (LP)

(Elektra) 9 tracks

In 1969, The Doors released their fourth album, moving a little away from the sounds of their earlier LPs and using horn and string arrangements.

"It was supposed to be a sonic extravaganza," Ray Manzarek wrote in his autobiography Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, "with horns and strings complementing our basic sound of guitar, keyboards and drums. We wanted to bring jazz cats, country and western pickers and classical pickers.

Like most of the band's catalogue, The Soft Parade was produced by Paul A. Rothchild, but Manzarek took the opportunity to have a hand in the process himself. "I enjoyed the hell out of producing the album," Manzarek wrote. "I especially enjoyed working with Paul Harris on the arrangements for the tracks, which were to have a sonic tapestry of horns and strings."

While it didn't go down in history as the easiest album to record (Manzarek described that it "took an incredibly long time to finish"), it was a commercially successful album: it gave the Doors another Top 10 album - it reached No. 6 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart - and gave the band another Top 5 single with "Touch Me", while three other tracks ("Wishful Sinful", "Tell All the People" and "Runnin' Blue") all climbed into the Hot 100.