Paris 1919 (1973)

Paris 1919 is the third solo studio album by the Welsh musician John Cale, released on 25 February 1973 by Reprise Records. Musicians including Lowell George of Little Feat and Wilton Felder performed on the album, which was produced by Chris Thomas.

In contrast to the experimental nature of much of Cale's work, the album is noted for its orchestral singer-songwriter style, reminiscent of contemporary pop rock music. Its title is a reference to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference following World War I, and its lyrics explore various aspects of early 20th-century European culture and history.

The album has received critical praise from several publications, including AllMusic and Rolling Stone.

Recording

Paris 1919 was recorded in 1972 and 1973 at Sunwest in Los Angeles. It was produced by Chris Thomas, who had previously worked with Procol Harum. Cale explained in a 1973 interview that he had employed Thomas to help add objectivity to the recording process. In the same interview he also mentioned that the album featured members of Little Feat; although musician credits were never included on the album's original packaging, the 2006 Rhino expanded CD edition credited Little Feat members Lowell George on guitar and Richie Hayward on drums, along with bassist and saxophonist Wilton Felder of the Crusaders and the University of California, Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra.

Music and lyrics

AllMusic considers Paris 1919 the most accessible and traditional of Cale's albums, and the best-known of his work as a solo artist. Paris 1919 takes its influences from pop and rock artists such as Brian Wilson, the Bee Gees, and Procol Harum, particularly the latter band's popular 1972 live album Live in Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Cale stated that some of the songs on the album dated back to before the release of his solo debut Vintage Violence (1970).

Lyrically, Cale recalls possible childhood memories in "Child's Christmas in Wales", whose title references Dylan Thomas' prose poem "A Child's Christmas in Wales"; the song also references Thomas' poem "The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait" in its second verse. According to Cale, "Half Past France" concerns "soldiers already dead talking about what's happened" at the end of World War I, while "Graham Greene" is about "the end of civilization, I guess". As well as Graham Greene, Cale makes cultural, literary, and geographical references to Macbeth, Enoch Powell, Chipping Sodbury, Andalusia, Dunkirk, and Segovia. "Antarctica Starts Here" was inspired by Cale's cocaine use and Gloria Swanson's role in the film Sunset Boulevard.

The album's title makes reference to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, an event that established a new partitioning of Europe as well as the assignment of war reparations. With the event having arguably contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany and subsequently the outbreak of World War II, Cale described the record as "an example of the nicest ways of saying something ugly."

Release and critical reception

Paris 1919 was released to warm critical reception. Rolling Stone writer Stephen Holden deemed it a "masterpiece" and "one of the most ambitious albums ever released under the name of 'pop'". He found that the songwriting "requires a great deal of listening in order for its full implications to be perceived". In Let It Rock, Mick Gold said that "Paris 1919 has more humanity and humour than anything I've previously associated with Cale". Gold wrote that Cale "loves style and chaos in equal quantities and he's never married them better than on this album", and concluded that "John Cale has succeeded in producing an album that is more accessible than his previous work without sacrificing his ability to evoke unvisited planets, and ... he has set his images in music that combines simplicity with subtle detail". Reviewing an import copy of Paris 1919 in Sounds, Martin Hayman noted that the songs were closer to rock music than classical music, and described the record as "a more satisfying collection than [The Academy in Peril]", calling it "a brilliant and indispensable album".

Subsequent positive reviews continued to be published many years later. AllMusic critic Jason Ankeny praised its "richly poetic" songs for functioning as "enigmatic period pieces strongly evocative of their time and place". He also wrote that "there's little here to suggest either Cale's noisy, abrasive past or the chaos about to resurface in his subsequent work", since Cale, according to Ankeny, "for better or worse... never achieved a similar beauty again." Tiny Mix Tapes remarked that "Cale slyly crafted a brilliant achievement in Paris 1919 by utilizing a mournful gentility to catch his original target audience unaware and hiding in plain sight." In 2010, Los Angeles Times critic Matt Diehl called Paris 1919 "the idiosyncratic pinnacle to Cale's thrilling yet perverse career, despite the fact it never topped the charts".