Whoa....Van Dyke Parks.
I love everything the man does. It's unreal to look at a list of all the people he's worked with. He's like a superhero or something, or a robot. I love his solo albums the most though. In fact, if I had to, I would trade my entire music collection to keep my VDP albums. I'm serious.
Like a lot of people, it all started with "Song Cycle" for me. I've never in my life reacted to music the way I did with that album. It is my favourite album of all time. "By The People" is my favourite. It has no rules.
Then I looked into all he's done and realized that my whole life I've been in love with his work, but didn't know it (like that time when I was 11 and someone was buying Ry Cooder's debut album at a store and I ran up to him and started to talk about the string arrangement on "One Meat Ball"...turns out he just likes Ry Cooder's guitar playing....). I quickly bought all VDP's albums and I love all of them to death. I can't choose a favourite. It's probably Tokyo Rose, actually. "Manzanar"....whoa. It sounds timeless. And it's a very smart record too. WHO writes such a beautiful song about a camp where they held Japanese Americans during WWII? VDP's who.
And don't even get me started on Jump.... actually, this album is probably my favourite.
Err, as you can see, I can't even choose my favourite VDP album, but I can easily say that he is my fave rave.
Have you seen this? It's great:
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=123pGTWPHAwOveralls are awesome...
Show Posts
