The Songs of Van Dyke Parks
Durable Goods
Transforming inventive songwriting into lasting art
Cloth – $125
979-8-240-40016-2
Paper – $24.95
979-8-240-40017-9
Publication Date
Paperback: 04/06/2027
Cloth: 04/06/2027
Cloth: 04/06/2027
Series: Music in American Life
About the Book
Van Dyke Parks began his career as a studio musician, songwriter, and recording artist in the 1960s, before adding credits as a producer, arranger, film composer, and music industry executive. Dale Carter focuses on Parks’s accomplished solo albums by exploring how and why his songs, conceived of as durable goods, continue to stand the test of time.Embracing the opportunity provided by his collaboration with Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, the Mississippi-born Parks enjoyed a career whose many bases and low profile gave him space to explore his art. His songs blended musical passion, personal experience, and social concern on albums devoted to significant and timely themes while his broad creative palette enabled him to find inspiration in styles ranging from classical to Appalachian, and musical theater to calypso.
An illuminating portrait of a singular creative voice, The Songs of Van Dyke Parks takes readers inside the songwriting of a resolutely original American artist and his enduring voyage of musical discovery.
* Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the Judith McCulloh Endowment for American Music.
About the Author
Dale Carter is an associate professor emeritus in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He is the author of Reading Smile: History, Myth and American Identity in Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ Long-Lost Album.Reviews
“I’ve spent over five decades reinventing the song form in an Odyssean tunesmith’s journey, with songs that are a spinal tap of Americana and that illustrate the potentials of the form as a cultural and socio-political force. This book reveals my trajectory and I’m very grateful for it. Beyond words at last.”—Van Dyke Parks
“Dale Carter does fans of American music, literature, and history the immense favor of bringing the sometimes inscrutable but always intriguing Van Dyke Parks out of the formidable shadow of Brian Wilson’s legendary SMILE pop symphony and into the full sunshine of his own inimitable talents. At once a revered arranger, cantankerous raconteur, and a living, breathing encyclopedia of all-things Americana, Parks has had a career like none other in pop music, but his own eclectic discography, from Song Cycle (1968) to Songs Cycled (2013), is overshadowed by his contributions to others’ careers. The Songs of Van Dyke Parks makes the case that from L.A. psychedelia to Caribbean cabaret, Southern folk, and Tin Pan Alley paeans, Parks has always been a paradoxical figure: at once an archivist of American sounds and myths and a true original.”
—Kirk Curnutt, author of Popular Music and American Literary Culture
Related Titles
