According to 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. On the other hand, 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.
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. 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.
Recording commenced in June 1989, 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.
Jordan: The Comeback has been described as nineteen songs dipped in conceptual aspic. The album's tracklisting was 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.
The album featured a variety of genres, among them funk, disco, country and bolero. The arrangements largely employed soft textures, something McAloon deemed "the most avant-garde thing you can do" amidst the rock music scene of 1990, ever present are the rich chord changes with slices of sly sampling. Many of the compositions carried the influence of Broadway theatre and McAloon found inspiration in songwriters including Rodgers and Hart, Burt Bacharach and Rod Temperton.
The album first five tracks were straightforward pop songs with no deliberate linking theme. "Looking for Atlantis" 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. 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 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" and "Carnival 2000" was about the celebrating the turn of the Millennium.
The tracks six through nine constituted 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." 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". "Moon Dog" imagines Colonel Tom Parker staging Presley's surprise comeback concert on the moon. The track samples applause from one of Presley's concerts.
The tracks ten through fourteen broadly were the section of love songs. From the upbeat "All the World Loves Lovers" concerned a new relationship with an ambiguous tone influenced by the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim. The only lyric in "All Boys Believe Anything" was a repetition of the title, a backronym of ABBA, "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 Wedding March" concerns marriage, with the lyrics declaring matrimony "one dance whose steps I never could learn".
The final section of the album from track fifteen to nineteen were 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". 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. McAloon considered "One of the Broken" was among his best compositions. The country-influenced song is written from the perspective of God, "One of the Broken" had the creator urging the faithful to help others rather that sing any "hymn of devotion". In contrast, "Michael" was sung from the perspective of a regretful Satan wishing to get back into heaven and surprising the archangel Michael by requesting help on writing a letter to God. "Michael" marked by a "gloriously sinister synth texture worthy of Depeche Mode". "Mercy" is the album's shortest track, performed solo by McAloon on acoustic guitar. It can be read as both a further plea from Satan or as a love song. The album's last two tracks directly concern death. "Scarlet Nights" was about someone waiting to die. "Doo Wop in Harlem" addresses a departed friend.
Two singles and an EP were released from the album. The band promoted the lead single "Looking for Atlantis. but it failed make the top 40 on the UK Singles Chart, reaching number 51. "We Let the Stars Go" was issued as the album's second single; but only peaked at number 50. Issued on 24 December 1990, Jordan: The EP – featuring "One of the Broken", "Jordan: The Comeback", "Carnival 2000" and "The Ice Maiden" – fared a little better than its predecessors, reaching number 35. In September 1992, a revised mix of "All the World Loves Lovers" received single release in support of A Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout, peaking at number 61.
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