Artist:     Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks

Album:     Orange Crate Art

Label:     Omnivore Recordings

Release Date:     6.19.20

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Turnabout was fair play for Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks with their 1994 recording of Orange Crate Art, as Parks needed a favor from his old friend. The glorious musical love letters he’d written to Southern California, couched in timeless melodies, swooning harmonies and blossoming hothouse flowers of arrangements, required Wilson’s voice to express what was in his bursting heart. Wilson owed him that much and happily repaid the debt.

In the wake of Pet Sounds’ swirling pop artistry and progressive ambition, Wilson brought Parks aboard in 1966 to help him conceive the groundbreaking SMiLE as The Beach Boys’ next magnum opus, with Parks providing the lyrics for an experimental assemblage of disparate parts of American music. Mothballed for what seemed an eternity, SMiLE’s legend grew, even as the recordings remained unreleased for years.

Like ships passing in the night, Wilson and Parks teamed together again to chart the course for The Beach Boys’ 1972 favorite “Sail on Sailor.” Eventually, they reanimated SMiLE, serving up its wide-ranging, reconstituted brilliance in the Grammy-award winning boxed set The Smile Sessions in 2011. That came after the making of Orange Crate Art, a colorful work of understated elegance lavishly reissued this summer in expanded two-CD and two-LP sets and expertly remastered by Michael Graves.

Vivid and warm, exuding innocence and mellow, old-timey charm, Orange Crate Art is simply sublime, a testament to Parks’ uncanny ability to mold and shape classic pop sculptures out of whatever happens to be lying around his workshop. It walks on the soft, calypso sand of “Sail Away,” with its lightly clipped strum and beachy steel drums, and whips up a lovely meringue of overlapping strings, sterling acoustic guitar and blended vocals for an intoxicating title track. The sweeping, cinematic grandeur of “Movies is Magic” is made for a widescreen experience, while a transient Parks dreams of past travels in a winsome “My Hobo Heart,” the twilight wash of “Palm Trees and Moon” soothes and the rollicking folk-rock of “San Francisco” sings like Crosby, Stills & Nash.

An extra disc of instrumental versions of Orange Crate Art tracks is packaged with the CD edition. Stripped of vocals, it shines a spotlight on the record’s instrumental complexity, as more rapturous wonders are found in previously unissued versions of “What a Wonderful World,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” with its dreamy orchestral ebbs and flows, and Gershwin’s “Love is Here to Stay.” The latter was specially recreated for Warner Bros. Records Chairman Mo Ostin and his wife Evelyn, and in the accompanying liner notes, containing the memories of both Wilson and Parks, Wilson admiringly remarked how it was reminiscent of the Four Freshmen. Their mutual respect and love for one another is evident here.

—Peter Lindblad