Teaser // Van Dyke Parks: SONGS CYCLED

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1:04to current events at the time. And so this dreaming of Paris thing, I believe, is a story about him. I think flying to Paris at the same time that the United States is invading Iraq, if memory serves correctly, and him just like, I think, finding out about that, having landed in Paris or getting the news while he was in the air, flying over the Atlantic or something like that. So he begins in Malibu, presumably where he was flying from in Los Angeles. In that indiscriminate bombing by the great Satan United States, oil crises, repatuous capitalism, a lot of stuff coming up in in 2026 reality, being dealt with here on songs cycled back in 2013, not that he necessarily environmental catastrophes for that matter,

2:10not that he necessarily intended it to be like that. But it's interesting, I think, to get this from him, because I've never really thought of Indyke as like a topical songwriter, certainly political question about that, but topical, you know, maybe a little bit less so. And so it's cool that he can do it just as well as he can do just about anything else. This topical, if you've seen his Instagram, he's always staying on top of this. Well, this was before the Instagram and come out. Maybe this is the beginning of what's going on with the Instagram stuff. But yeah, what does he have to say here in one of the interviews, themes of sadness, confusion, and anger recur in several songs, including the opening track, Dreaming of Paris. My wife and I took a flight to Paris where I was going to conduct an orchestra. Some arrangements, I did for Rufus Wainwright, underground at the Louvre with the pyramid overhead. This is a different Paris than the one my wife knew years ago when she was running a small

3:13shop in the flea market there at the Martien Malique, which actually references in this song. She, his wife, had left the United States in 1969 after the death of Martin Luther King and Memphis, her hometown. She'd had it with the gunplay, so she expatriated to Paris and lived there for six years selling clothes in the flea market. And we got on the plane to return to Paris, the Paris she had loved, her first revisit, and that was the night George W. Bush chose to drop the bombs on the cradle of civilization that place called Baghdad. The song is all about the futility of war, the inappropriateness of bellicosity, the lessons we learned in Vietnam all lost on George W. Bush. God, yeah, it is relevant. Very interesting, the futility of war, the inappropriateness of bellicosity, the lessons we learned in Vietnam all lost on George W. Bush. Some might say those lessons have been lost on several other individuals. They've done been lost still.

4:15Indeed. Yeah, I was just reading about how there might in fact be a ground invasion of Iran. Oh boy, well, I hope you have fun fighting over there. But you're not going? I'm old. I'm out of the draft range, but you're a young whipper snapper, so you're just going to get sucked right up. I'm going to sit right over there. Flat feet or a cough. Who are we getting? We're both going to be drafted into the Israel Defense Force in order to lay our lives down for the great president of these United States, Benjamin Netanyahu. It's a pretty good song. Yeah, good song. It's a fun one.