EX “Song Cycle” Van Dyke Parks 1968 Warner Bros Vinyl LP WS 1727 W7 green labels
$
40
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Description
EX / EX copy on green W7 labels.
1 label has writing.
Cleaned on the VPI cyclone, professionally packaged in a real record mailer and shipped free immediately upon receipt of payment.
Song Cycle is the debut album by the American recording artist Van Dyke Parks. Released in November 1967 by Warner Bros. Records, the album unperformed in sales but was largely acclaimed by critics, and it later became a cult classic. In 2017, Pitchfork ranked it the 93rd greatest album of the 1960s.
With the exception of three cover songs, Song Cycle was written and composed by Parks. The album was produced by Lenny Waronker, a Warner Bros. staff producer. The album draws on a number of forms of American popular music, including bluegrass, ragtime, and show tunes, and frames classical styles in the context of 1960s pop music.[6] The material utilizes unconventional song structures, and lyrically explores American history and culture, reflecting Parks' history working in both the film and music industries of Southern California.
Van Dyke Parks had become known as an in-demand arranger and session pianist in Los Angeles during the mid-1960s, working with artists including the Byrds, Tim Buckley, and Paul Revere & the Raiders. At the same time, he had become unsatisfied with contemporary American pop and its increasing submissiveness to the British invasion, going so far as to say that "apart from Pet Sounds I didn't find anything striking coming out of the United States."[7] Wanting to create "an American experience which would be uniquely disassociable [sic] from the Beatles/British pop viewpoint," he became involved with numerous projects that indulged his interest in Depression-era American pop and folk music, such as co-writing and arranging much of Harpers Bizarre's 1967 album Anything Goes, releasing the singles "Come to the Sunshine" and "Number Nine", and working as Brian Wilson's lyricist and assistant arranger for the Beach Boys' Smile project.[7]
Parks was subsequently signed as a recording artist by Warner Bros. Records;[8] the label reportedly expected that he could deliver them commercial success on par with the Beach Boys' at that time.[9] During this epoch, Parks visited Frank Sinatra, who was dispirited by the rise of rock music and considering retirement. Parks pitched his brother Carson's song "Somethin' Stupid" as a duet for Sinatra and his daughter Nancy. Reportedly on Lee Hazlewood's advice, Sinatra recorded "Somethin' Stupid", which became his first million-selling single. This bought credit for Parks at Warner Bros, and they proceeded to fund what would become Parks' one single from Song Cycle, an instrumental cover of Donovan's 1965 song "Colours". It was credited to "George Washington Brown"—a fictitious pianist from South America—to protect his family from the potential infamy of his "musical criminology".[10] "Donovan's Colours" received an ecstatic two-page review from Richard Goldstein, which convinced the label of Parks's ability.[11]
After Parks signed a solo contract with Warner Bros, he formed a creative circle that came to include producer Lenny Waronker and songwriter Randy Newman.[12] He subsequently abandoned the Smile project, which would never be finished.[13]
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