Moonlighting: Live At The Ash Grove
Parks has always been a moonlighter, producing albums by Little Feat and Randy Newman, writing arrangements for U2 and Victoria Williams, and composing film scores. He's also recorded half a dozen albums on his own, but he's spent most of his career in the shadow of an early failed collaboration: his work as lyricist for Brian Wilson's epic '60s disaster,Smile.Moonlighting, a live recording taken from a 1996 performance, places him in the spotlight's full glare. There may be a 17-piece band behind him, but Parks sings (by his own admission badly) and plays piano throughout, displaying the personality a bitter environmentalist one moment, and then self-assured professor the next-that drives the album. Though he's lived in California since the '60s, Parks was born in Mississippi and even without the drawl he remains a Southerner. That he's a sentimentalist is evident in the Br'er Rabbit-inspired "Jump!" and "Hominy Grove," but he also has an intellectual's appreciation for the past. Occasionally, this leads him astray; listen to his stilted version of Uncle Dave Macon's old folk tune, "C-H-I-C-K-E-N." More often it feels right, especially on a lovely orchestral remake of John Hartford's "Delta Queen Waltz" and a pair of instrumentals inspired by the 19th-century New Orleans composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk.Moonlightingis a welcome anachronism, with its star reading a Robert Frost poem, singing a song about FDR's trip to the Caribbean before cruiseships, and reinventing Little Feat's "Sailin' Shoes" as a slide-guitar-and-strings art song. Between songs, Parks admits, "This isn't a franchise operation, folks." Thank God for that, not to mention Parks's thin voice and slightly misshapen heart.--Keith Moerer