Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks

I realize I'm responding to an old post, but there's a bit of straw man building here, and I also wanted to add a positive response to this album.




This is a bit glib.  The album has depth.  The difficulty listeners seem to have is in how coherent they find the album, and in the fact that it's not rock music.  Comparing it to other albums from 1968 is pretty unfair.  Your implication is to compare with other rock/pop music of its time, but Van Dyke never seemed very interested in rock and roll.  This album has a lot more in common with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, or T.S. Elliott than The Beatles, Beach Boys, or Rolling Stones.  It's an attempt to see pop music as modernist writers saw literature, hence the range of styles as Van makes an image of himself in sound.




What is the pretense, though?  I think the song, "Van Dyke Parks," is very striking.  He basically took the ideas he and Brian wanted to express with "Surf's Up" and made his own version.  Naming the song after himself, with that credit to Public Domain, shows the influence history has had on him, and us.  Civilization doesn't just fade a way, like in "Surf's Up, but we are unknowingly its echoes.  I don't think there's anything pretentious about it.  It has more layers than most of the music you're comparing it to, and more than that Van is content to let the song be it's own explanation.  That makes it a lot closer to literature than rock music.


I also think the album is very melodic, but his influences are pre-rock songwriters.  The melodies are more informed by classical music or jazz.  "Widow's Walk," for example, is extremely melodic, it just isn't as simple the music you're comparing it to.  You're listening to a writer with a deeper sense of the way music works than most of his peers had.  You have to compare this to people like Charles Ives, not The Jefferson Airplane or Brian Wilson.  Nelson Riddle, Gil Evans, or even Duke Ellington may not be bad comparisons, as Van's music is quite impressionistic.  He's not trying to make songs to compete with a hundred other singles on the radio, where he has to get an keep your attention is quickly and immediately as possible.  Most rock music does not really "hold the  mirror to nature," (to quote Hamlet) but Song Cycle does.  He is cutting up folk music with the attitude of a classical, jazz, or third stream composer.




Very much disagree here.  If that were the case, Smile would have been released and Song Cycle would be a bunch of scraps, an unreleased curiosity discussed by a few Beach Boys fans.  Considering his professionalism and Brian's erratic behavior during Smile, Van might be why we have as much Smile as we do.




This is also untrue, as you know.  "The Little Girl I Once Knew" did not do well, and Pet Sounds was a bigger hit with musicians than in the charts.  You're also judging Song Cycle as something it's not trying to be.  I don't think there's any reason to believe Van hoped this would be a hit album.  Even Warner Bros. seemed to hope for a critical favorite--maybe a little like Pet Sounds, but not as popular.  If we compare this album to "Hey Jude" or "Jumping Jack Flash" then the best outcome is eloquent misinterpretation.  Unlike these other songs and albums from 68, this really is a piece of music.  We could think of it as an opera for one--an inner opera, exploring one mind, rather than a set of characters.  It is not unlike Scott Walker's later albums (say Tilt) in that sense.



I think it has heart, but he makes you work in ways Brian never would.  Song Cycle shows everything, and tells nothing.  Brian put his emotions on record, but Van is trying to illustrate an entire psyche with his music.  Rock music doesn't do that, which is why Song Cycle confuses a lot of rock listeners.  





I know from your posts you can do better than that  That's just an unnecessary attack.  Even if you don't like Song Cycle, the talent is hard to deny.  Albums like this don't just accidentally make themselves.  I also think your dismissal could as easily apply to Forever Changes, with its impressionistic lyrics.  The difference is Forever Changes is easier to like because the music fits with the rock/pop trends of its time.  In other words, you can tune out half of what they're expressing to focus on the familiar.  You can't ignore the music or lyrics of Song Cycle, and this alone makes it superior.  Comparing Song Cycle to Love, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, or a lot of other music from 68, I find it hard to see in Van's music pretense or a false depth and intelligence.  He is expressing a view of his life and America pretty sincerely, while those other bands (as much as I enjoy them) often grabbed at the buzzwords and ideas of their time (i.e. "The Golden Road of Unlimited Devotion").  Your criticism apply much more to so-called psychedelic music than Song Cycle.  The songs on Nuggets are guilty here, not Van Dyke Parks.




I certainly wish he had done more like Song Cycle.  It's one of those albums with little influence because few have the talent to imitate it.  And the music I find similar isn't very directly connected.  It makes me think more of Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz or Skies of America.  Even "Aja" by Steely Dan isn't so far off, I guess.  




Maybe, but if so then I think it haunts him as a friend and partner of Brian Wilson.  As someone who cared about him.  And perhaps as a professional who likes to finish what he starts.  Artistically, I don't know if it haunts him.  I imagine he'd rather be known for much more than Smile (which you also acknowledge).



Absolutely.  We probably just wouldn't hear about it as easily, as you allude to.  It's one of those rare pieces of music which grows with time, instead of diminishing.  It's to the shame of the audience if they don't hear life in it, not unlike those who dismiss Finnegans Wake.  We can't judge a work's intelligence if we don't judge it on its own terms.



I only know The United Stares of America by name, but otherwise I largely agree with this.  Though, with Smile we always have to be careful not to project onto it too much--an easy temptation since it is incomplete.  Our comparisons can only go so far.

I didn't vote, because I'm not interested in rating things.  This is a fully realized album which deserves to be revisited over time as our own awareness changes.  As much as I love Smile (an inevitable, though not ideal, comparison), I burned out on a lot of it about 20 years ago.  I enjoy Song Cycle more every time I return to it.  It has the depth and intelligence, which Brian needed Van for.  Smile was an attempt at grabbing the zeitgeist, which is a more pretentious move than anything on Song Cycle, an album which seems pretty content to just be itself.  As beautiful as Smile's music is, and as fun as the lyrics are, we can also argue that it's allusions to Wordsworth only highlight a lack of depth and articulation, in comparison. I don't believe that's true with Song Cycle.  If Smile were finished, I imagine it would have a lot of the excited of "Good Vibrations" and a little more emotional depth, but listeners would connect more personally with the kind of music Brian went on to make, anyway.  Song Cycle would still be something informed by very different areas of music.