- Record Label: Everloving
- Release Date: Aug 12, 2008
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Parks proves an ideal partner for George, who grew up studying Shakespeare and is married to a film director, Jake Kasdan.
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The album's light-fantastic orchestration, courtesy of famed songwriter and composer Parks , is equally delightfully old-fashioned--though George's decidedly contemporary lyrics recall the arch-baroque confessionals of Rufus Wainwright and Fiona Apple. [15 Aug 2008, p.67]
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Although the daughter of Little Feat's late leader Lowell George charms with a crisp, vibrato-less chirp that suits her airy tunes, the star here is Parks, Brian Wilson's SMiLE collaborator, who surrounds George in a florid orchestral fantasia that flickers like a luscious, precisely gardened flower bed teeming with hidden fauna.
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George dives in full bore, her voice navigating his undulating road map like so many animated bluebirds flitting through a forest.
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It’s one of those beguiling albums saved for times alone, times when nothing else would seem quite right.
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An Invitation adds a new chapter to that story, told in an unmistakably American idiom fusing Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and Copland, spotlighting Inara George as a sophisticated new voice and confirming Van Dyke Parks, at 68, as an inexhaustibly vital national treasure.
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An Invitation must have been a fun side project, but it may have all the permanence of the summer breeze it captures so perfectly.
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Under The RadarInvitation will surely add to Park's continuing influences in the pop community. [Fall 2008, p.80]