Only Visiting This Planet
| Only Visiting This Planet | ||||
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| Studio album by Larry Norman | ||||
| Released | 1972 | |||
| Recorded | AIR Studios, London | |||
| Genre | Christian rock | |||
| Label | Verve | |||
| Producer | Rod Edwards, Roger Hand and Jon Miller | |||
| Larry Norman chronology | ||||
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| Allmusic |  |
Only Visiting This Planet is an album recorded by Larry Norman in 1972. The album was selected as the second album in CCM Magazine's The 100 Greatest Albums in Christian Music. In April 2014 the album was announced as one of 25 sound recordings inducted for 2013 into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, that preserves as "cultural, artistic and/or historical treasures, representing the richness and diversity of the American soundscape", making it the first Christian rock album chosen for the registry.
On 8 September 1972 Norman began recording his second studio album,Only Visiting This Planet, the first album in a projected trilogy, in AIR Studios in London.Only Visiting This Planet, often ranked as Norman's best album, "mixed his Christian message with strong political themes", and "was meant to reach the flower children disillusioned by the government and the church" with its "abrasive, urban reality of the gospel". In a 1980 interview, Norman explained its purpose:
Only Visiting This Planet is the first part of the trilogy, and represents the present. On the front cover, I find myself standing in the middle of New York City, with buildings and traffic pressed around me and my hand on my head kind of saying, What is going on in this life? Is this really earth?, and the back cover is me visiting the site of a previous civilisation with its own monoliths, not skyscrapers, but amazing, architecturally sound structures just the same. The Druids apparently constructed Stonehenge to help them observe or worship the sun, and their civilisation is now as dead as will someday be New York. And I'm just standing there, looking around, wondering what happened to kill off this culture and reduce its entire recorded history to a few standing structures.
On 6 January 1973 Norman was one of three named as Best New Male Artist of the year by Cashbox. By February 1973 songs from Only Visiting This Planet had been recommended by Billboard for "heavy Top 40 airplay", and were being played on WVVS-FM, KSHE-FM, and WKTK-FM. In 1990 CCM magazine voted Only Visiting This Planet as "the greatest Christian album ever recorded".Only Visiting This Planet was one of 25 sound recordings inducted for 2013 into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, that preserves as "cultural, artistic and/or historical treasures, representing the richness and diversity of the American soundscape." A statement by the Library of Congress called the album "the key work in the early history of Christian rock," describing Norman as one who "commented on the world as he saw it from his position as a passionate, idiosyncratic outsider to mainstream churches."
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