With Van Dyke Parks’ new Songs Cycled (Bella Union), the renowned composer, arranger and vocalist (in that order), not only releases his first album of originals since 1995’s Orange Crate Art (with Brian Wilson singing), but lends his usually complex creations a renewed sense of simplicity. The thoughts may be determinedly complicated and touched by the soul of social protest, but Parks’ music is deliciously direct, while remaining as elegant as anything he’s done for himself (à la 1968’s chamber-pop initiator Song Cycle) or others (the Beach Boys and Rufus Wainwright amongst them). Parks will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature with him.
Parks: I first read this short story when I was 12. (It struck me then that Christ had it all figured out way before, in his warnings against greed.) It remains in my present tense. The rich are no hipper now to the poor than they were in times of the Bourbon kings. (The friction between those two social plates has increased as I enter my eighth decade here.) I see this story as a prosaic intro to the ethical questions to the rich by the poor. Study this inconvenient truth further in the poetry of Provide Provide by Robert Frost. (The latter, a tale right outta Hollywood, on the same theme, but thru misfortunes of fleeting fame.)
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT18opEenU
