Moving Pictures

At the end of the Permanent Waves tour the band dropped plans for a second live album and decided to make a studio record. They wrote at Stony Lake, Ontario, worked up demos at Phase One Studios in Toronto in late August 1980 with Terry Brown, and recorded at Le Studio in October and November. It was their first 48-track recording, and the album was mixed to a Sony digital machine. Technical problems delayed it by two weeks. Lyricist Pye Dubois supplied the poem that became Tom Sawyer.

Side one has Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, YYZ and Limelight. Side two has The Camera Eye, the last studio track of over ten minutes the band made, then Witch Hunt and Vital Signs, which was written and recorded in a mostly improvised way because the album was about four minutes short. Hugh Syme designed the cover, which shows movers carrying pictures outside the Ontario Legislative Building in Toronto.

It reached number one in Canada and number three in both the United States and Britain, and was certified platinum in the United States in April 1981, two months after release. It has since gone five times platinum there. YYZ was nominated for a Grammy for best rock instrumental performance. In a 2022 review of the 40th anniversary reissue, Pitchfork's Alfred Soto wrote that the album mastered concision. Rolling Stone placed it at number 379 on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums. The band played the whole album in the second set of every Time Machine tour show in 2010 and 2011.