Omnivore RecordingsIn 1995, Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson teamed up with Van Dyke Parks, the main lyricist for the band’s long-delayed Smile project, to release an album of mostly original Parks compositions, called Orange Crate Art.
Now, an expanded 25th anniversary edition of the album is scheduled to be released on June 19 as a two-CD set and a two-LP vinyl collection. Both versions will feature three previously unreleased bonus tracks from the sessions — renditions of the standards “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Love Is Here to Stay” and “What a Wonderful World” — while the two-CD edition also will include a disc’s worth of unreleased instrumentals.
Parks conceived Orange Crate Art as an homage to his adopted home state of California. The album features Wilson contributing lead vocals throughout.
As Van Dyke explains in the album’s liner notes, “Though my roots are somewhere else, far away, my limbs are here in Southern California…it’s here…that I have struggled desperately for a sense of place…Orange Crate Art is a continuum of that which stood, freeze-frame, at the release of Smile.”
RollingStone.com premiered Wilson and Parks’ rendition of “What a Wonderful World” today.
A limited-edition orange-vinyl version of Orange Crate Art will be available exclusively at Omnivore Recordings’ website; only 300 copies of this edition of the two-LP set are being produced.
Here’s the track list of the CD version of the Orange Crate Art reissue:
Disc One
“Orange Crate Art”
“Sail Away”
“My Hobo Heart”
“Wings of a Dove”
“Palm Tree and Moon”
“Summer in Monterey”
“San Francisco”
“Hold Back Time”
“My Jeanine”
“Movies Is Magic”
“This Town Goes Down at Sunset”
“Lullaby”
Previously Unissued Extra Tracks:
“Rhapsody in Blue”
“Love Is Here to Stay”
“What a Wonderful World”
Disc Two: Previously Unissued Instrumentals
“Orange Crate Art”
“Sail Away”
“My Hobo Heart”
“Wings of a Dove”
“Palm Tree and Moon”
“Summer in Monterey”
“San Francisco”
“Hold Back Time”
“My Jeanine”
“Movies Is Magic”
“This Town Goes Down at Sunset”
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