Van Dyke Parks - Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove
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CD Details
Artist: Van Dyke ParksEdition: Music CD
Format: Live
CD Release Date: 1998-02-10
Music Label: Warner Bros / Wea
Soundtracks:
- Jump!
- Orange Crate Art
- Wings of a Dove
- Sail Away
- Night in the Tropics - Van Dyke Parks, Gottschalk
- FDR in Trinidad
- Danza - Van Dyke Parks, Gottschalk
- Cowboy
- Delta Queen Waltz - Van Dyke Parks, Hartford, John
- The C-H-I-C-K-E-N
- All Golden
- Hominy Grove
- Sailin' Shoes - Van Dyke Parks, George, Lowell
Music reviews of Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove
Music Review: Van Dyke Parks at his best
Rating: 5 Stars
I've been a fan of Van Dyke Parks since "Song Cycle." It's hard to get people to like his music, though, because his voice is considered irritating by most people. About the first 20 times I heard it, I hated it too. But I had a friend who was really into it, and he kept playing the damned thing. Finally, I started to get it, with "Donovan's Colours." I then gradually came to like the other songs, and now it's one of my all-time favorite albums.
"Moonlighting" is a concert -- man would I like to go to a Van Dyke Parks conert!! -- his voice sounds much, much better in concert than it does in studio recordings. This is a very playful, pretty performance.
I guess VDP is known for his lush, complicated arrangements -- he loves his violins, and many of his orchestrations feature a harp (kind of a neglected instrument). Of course the other thing he's known for is his collaboration with Brian Wilson, which resulted in an album, and ultimately came to a bad end before "Smile" could be produced. He wrote the words to "Heroes and Villains" -- those lyrics are characteristic of his style of writing words, I think.
If you want to try out Van Dyke Parks, I don't think there's a better way to do it than "Moonlighting." This is a very entertaining collection of songs, beautifully orchestrated, and sung really quite pleasantly by the man himself.
Description of Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove
Parks has always been a moonlighter, producing albums by Little Feat and Randy Newman, writing arrangements for U2 and Victoria Williams, and composing film scores. He's also recorded half a dozen albums on his own, but he's spent most of his career in the shadow of an early failed collaboration: his work as lyricist for Brian Wilson's epic '60s disaster, Smile. Moonlighting, a live recording taken from a 1996 performance, places him in the spotlight's full glare. There may be a 17-piece band behind him, but Parks sings (by his own admission badly) and plays piano throughout, displaying the personality a bitter environmentalist one moment, and then self-assured professor the next-that drives the album. Though he's lived in California since the '60s, Parks was born in Mississippi and even without the drawl he remains a Southerner. That he's a sentimentalist is evident in the Br'er Rabbit-inspired "Jump!" and "Hominy Grove," but he also has an intellectual's appreciation for the past. Occasionally, this leads him astray; listen to his stilted version of Uncle Dave Macon's old folk tune, "C-H-I-C-K-E-N." More often it feels right, especially on a lovely orchestral remake of John Hartford's "Delta Queen Waltz" and a pair of instrumentals inspired by the 19th-century New Orleans composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Moonlighting is a welcome anachronism, with its star reading a Robert Frost poem, singing a song about FDR's trip to the Caribbean before cruiseships, and reinventing Little Feat's "Sailin' Shoes" as a slide-guitar-and-strings art song. Between songs, Parks admits, "This isn't a franchise operation, folks." Thank God for that, not to mention Parks's thin voice and slightly misshapen heart. --Keith MoererCountry CDs
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