Magic Garden music

I'm all about categories and genres and labels, so I have lots of categorized playlists on my iPod, like Christmas music, Beatles, old school, summer, etc. I'm about to construct a new one that I'm wanting to call "Magic Garden" for lack of a more specific phrase. And here's how it came about:

I love the 5th Dimension and their soaring vocal arrangements. On a reissue of one of their 60's albums, I discovered a nifty Jimmy Webb tune called "The Magic Garden." A little later, I discovered a version of the same song on a Dusty Springfield collection, and her version blew the 5th's out of the water. One day, my old iPod shuffle happened to play Dusty's "Magic Garden" and followed it with Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" (also a Jimmy Webb song), Harry Nilsson's "1941," Dionne Warwick's "Trains and Boats and Planes," and Noel Harrison's late 60's swingin' pop take on Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne." At the end of that run of songs, I felt like I'd discovered a new genre of music, though it's difficult to put into words what the genre's conventions are.

The closest name already out there is "Baroque pop," which Wikipedia defines as pop music with classical music influences, but that seems awfully broad, encompassing anything from the Beatles to Procol Harum to Jeff Beck to Emerson Lake and Palmer and so on. Wikipedia goes on to talk about "modern baroque pop," or chamber rock, and many of the recent artists they name in conjunction with this movement are ones I like (The Decembrists, Panic at the Disco, Last Shadow Puppets, Pink Martini) but most of them don't exactly sound like what I'm thinking of.

Here are the conventions I've come up with for my Magic Garden music:

1) Strong string or horn orchestration--though of course, that alone isn't enough, since everyone from Bing Crosby to Guns N' Roses uses orchestration.

2) An overall feel somewhere between easy listening and psychedelia, as the strings are usually accompanied by something interesting like a harpsichord or a sitar.

3) The songs are often multi-part, with fast and slow movements and quirky arrangements.

4) The vocals are emotional or dramatic (some might say "overwrought" as in "MacArthur Park").

5) Most of it was made in the mid to late 60's.


I guess I could say that most of these songs were written by Jimmy Webb or Burt Bacharach, both sophisticated songwriters, but that would narrow things down too much. They sometimes have a "sunshine pop" feel to them, like "The Magic Garden" itself, but just as often they are sad or downbeat. They lend themselves to multiple voices (5th Dimension, backing singers for Harris and Warwick).

Maybe the best definition I could come up with is "60's middle-of-the-road psychedelia." Not all Webb and Bacharach is Magic Garden music--"By the Time I Get to Phoenix," no; "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," no. Much of the 5th Dimension's 60's output is, but their album of Webb songs that bears the Magic Garden name is mostly drabber and shushier than it should be--and "The Girl's Song," though a Webb/5th D masterpiece, is not Magic Garden music. The best place to start to listen may well be disc 2 of the Dusty Springfield Anthology, with "What's It Gonna Be?," "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten," "The Windmills of Your Mind," and, of course, "The Magic Garden." YouTube has a nice video montage set to a medley of songs from the 5th D Magic Garden LP, but nothing of Dusty (at left) doing the song. Certainly I have gone on far too long about this, but I'd rather spend time worrying about the boundaries of a non-existent music genre than about terrorism or finances or the bleakness of infinity. In the words of "The Magic Garden," "It's so soft and warm/ Behind those hedges/No hard edges..."