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: Great titles raise heightened expectations for what lies beyond. Eggers aces it here, and won a Pulitzer prize for it. He then careened off on a career arc rife with social topics demanding immediate justice. His intimate focus on under-doggerel has global sweep.
Why Eggers? He empowers others, through his publishing work at McSweeny’s magazine (subscribe to it!), Eggers’ outreach reaches inner-city students in seminars—they, who only need an invitation to assimilate and follow suit in the humanities. If you haven’t read this book, you won’t ever know our velocity—and you’ll never judge a book by its movie again.
Video after the jump.
