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 – straightfoward 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".