Life in a Tin Can

Life in a Tin Can is the Bee Gees' eleventh studio album (ninth worldwide), released in January 1973. The Bee Gees moved their base of operations from England to Los Angeles to record Life in a Tin Can. However, it was unable to prevent a commercial decline with the album criticised for a lack of innovation. Despite its low sales and poor chart performance, Life in a Tin Can was awarded "Album of the Year" by Record World magazine. It was the first Bee Gees album to bear the RSO label in the US.

Contents

• Track listing
• Chart performance
• Personnel
• Songs
• References

The lead track, "Saw a New Morning", contains melodic ideas that the group later revisited on the track "Edge of the Universe". Four of the eight songs were written by all three brothers with the other four being Barry Gibb compositions. The album reached No. 10 on the Italian charts and sold 175,000 copies worldwide. "Saw a New Morning" was a No. 1 hit in Hong Kong. No recording dates are available for the sessions on this album. At the time of the sessions, Robin Gibb had to leave the sessions suddenly when his son Spencer was born a month early. That date was 21 September. Atlantic Records' log dates the whole album as 22 September. Robin returned to Los Angeles a week or so later to continue on into the next album. The musicians who participated on Life in a Tin Can were Jim Keltner, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Tommy Morgan, Jerome Richardson, Rick Grech, Jane Getz and Johnny Pate. This was the first album since Bee Gees' 1st not to have a solo lead vocal by Maurice Gibb.

When asked by Billboard why they moved from London to Los Angeles, Maurice says: "We don't want to talk about it yet. But we're going to attempt a concept album that's a major departure from our usual Bee Gees trademarks. And if that doesn't work out, we'll do something else".