New VDP Album Due in May

[the captain]

The headine at Pitchfork got me excited. Unfortunately, it looks like the new album, "Songs Cycled," is pretty much a collection of his recent singles: looks to me like Aquarium is the only thing not in my iTunes already. Still, it's nice to see him releasing something, and hopefully it sells reasonably well.

01 Dreaming of Paris (original)
02 Hold Back Time (re-recording of song from Orange Crate Art)
03 Sassafras (new recording, originally by Billy Edd Wheeler)
04 Black Gold (a fantasy on the sinking of The Prestige, off the coast of the Bay of Biscay, recorded in 2002)
05 Aquarium (cover of Saint-Saëns piece, recorded in 1971 with the Esso Trinidad Steel Band)
06 Money Is King (picks up where "Wall Street" ends, written with Growling Tiger, a.k.a. Trinidadian Calypso musician Neville Marcano)
07 Wall Street (original)
08 The Parting Hand (version of a Sacred Harp hymn from the 1800s)
09 The All Golden (a re-recording from Song Cycle)
10 Wedding in Madagascar (version of traditional folk song)
11 Missin' Mississippi (original)
12 Amazing Graces (ft. The Van Dyke Parks Orchestra)

More info and an essay by VDP are here: http://bellaunion.com/2013/02/van-dyke-parks-to-release-songs-cycled-on-may-6th/

[rn57]

http://bellaunion.com/2013/02/van-dyke-parks-super-chief-music-for-the-silver-screen-secret/

Van Dyke emailed me a couple weeks ago, mentioning the upcoming release of Songs Cycled - and also said Bella Union would release an "entirely instrumental" album of his, to be titled Super Chief.  The above link gives the full title, which indicates that the record will draw from his soundtrack work - from which films I don't know. He's scored about 15 theatrical features, a dozen movies for broadcast and cable TV, and quite a few TV episodes in his time.  Some of the films on which he worked had their own soundtrack albums released - the Sesame Street film Follow That Bird and a Barney the dinosaur movie come to mind.

Van Dyke explains the origins of the Super Chief title in this recent interview
http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/?id=11900

[rab2591]

Fantastic news! I'm glad that May is right around the corner!

[rn57]

http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/03/van-dyke-parks-to-compile-new-material-on-songs-cycled/

This article about the upcoming Van Dyke Parks album has audio of one of the tracks - his remake of Hold Back Time from Orange Crate Art. Phenomenal arrangement, and a vocal that really gets to the heart of the lyric.