Song Cycle

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Song Cycle album cover
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Total Tracks: 12   Total Length: 32:53

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Richard Gehr

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Richard Gehr has been writing about international music -- and many other things -- for more than two decades. After moving to Los Angeles from Portland, OR, vi...more »

01.11.10
A wildly ambitious song of the South — specifically, Southern California — from the famous orchestrator and Smile lyricist
2007 | Label: Rhino/Warner Bros.

The 1968 debut by this prolific string arranger (and Brian Wilson lyricist) is a wildly ambitious song of the South — specifically, Southern California. The classically-inclined neonostalgic product of a very particular time and place, Song Cycle fuses Ives-ian compositional gambits with free-associative wordplay ("Through the panes cloud buttermilk war remains and twisted cross war refrains," goes "The Attic") to paint an autobiographical portrait of life in the Los Angeles rock demimonde at the height of the Vietnam War. Van Dyke Parks reanimates ragtime and Dixieland for Randy Newman's "Vine Street" and the two-part "Laurel Canyon Blvd.," juxtaposing youthful hedonism with the heavier meditations of "Widow's Walk" and the album's exquisite democratic apex, "By the People." The Civil War isn't over yet, Parks suggests. In fact, it's not even that civil.

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One of the masterpieces of modern music

mlstein

Kaleidoscopic fragmentary music from 1930s musicals to the pop of 1969, lyrics that push multiple meanings to the point of gibberish and beyond, and yet all somehow lyrical. This is one of the pinnacles of post-war American music, period--whatever genre--and it's as fresh now as it was then, when I bought my first copy in vinyl. What is it about? Everything and nothing, perhaps; the collapse of meaning, the loss of the past, California as metaphor for the hollowness of modernity. Van Dyke Parks is a genius, and that genius was never more potently expressed than it is here.

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Van Dyke Parks moved on from the Beach Boys’ abortive SMiLE sessions to record his own solo debut, Song Cycle, an audacious and occasionally brilliant attempt to mount a fully orchestrated, classically minded work within the context of contemporary pop. As indicated by its title, Song Cycle is a thematically coherent work, one which attempts to embrace the breadth of American popular music; bluegrass, ragtime, show tunes — nothing escapes Parks’ radar, and the sheer eclecticism and individualism of his work is remarkable. Opening with “Vine Street,” authored by Randy Newman (another pop composer with serious classical aspirations), the album is both forward-thinking and backward-minded, a collision of bygone musical styles with the progressive sensibilities of the late ’60s; while occasionally overambitious and at times insufferably coy, it’s nevertheless a one-of-a-kind record, the product of true inspiration. – Jason Ankeny

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