Paris 1919 (album)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Paris 1919 is a 1973 album by former Velvet Underground member John Cale. It was produced by Chris Thomas and features a backing band consisting largely of members of Little Feat. It is the most accessible and traditional of Cale's albums, and the most well-known of his work as a solo artist.
A remastered and expanded edition was released in 2006. It features alternate versions of each song on the album, as well as the previously unreleased session outtake "Burned Out Affair".
Despite the fact that John Cale has set poems of Dylan Thomas to music, the song "Child's Christmas In Wales" only shares a title with Thomas' prose poem of the same name. The song does reference another Thomas poem, 'The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait', in its second verse.
The closing track, 'Antarctica Starts Here' is a set piece in surrealism. On 27 Aug 1983, Dallas Brooks Hall, Melbourne Australia, Cale introduced it as a song about a film star who 'goes go-ga crazy'. This seems to tie it to Frances Farmer - an actress who underwent multiple ECT electro-convulsive therapy hence the closing lines 'The Anaesthetic's wearing off / Antarctica starts here." However, later, Cale stated the song referred to the film Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson.
Track listing
All tracks were composed and arranged by John Cale.
- "Child's Christmas in Wales"
- "Hanky Panky Nohow"
- "The Endless Plain of Fortune"
- "Andalucia"
- "Macbeth"
- "Paris 1919"
- "Graham Greene"
- "Half Past France"
- "Antarctica Starts Here"
