Paris 1919 was recorded in 1972 and 1973 with producer Chris Thomas, and, although musician credits were never given on the album's packaging until the 2006 Rhino expanded CD edition, it features Little Feat members Lowell George on guitar and Richie Hayward on drums, in addition to Wilton Felder of The Crusaders on bass as well as orchestration provided by the UCLA Symphony Orchestra.
Content
considers it 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, particular the latter band's popular 1972 live album Live in Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Lyrically, Cale recalls possible childhood memories in "Child's Christmas in Wales", whose title is a reference to a prose poem by Dylan Thomas and a reference to Thomas' poem "The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait" in its second verse. Cale makes cultural and literary references to writer Graham Greene, William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Enoch Powell, Chipping Sodbury, Andalucia, Dunkirk, and Segovia, while "Antarctica Starts Here" is inspired by the 1950 Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson. 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 unilateral war reparations. With the event having arguably contributed substantially to the rise of the Third Reich and the emergence of World War II, Cale described the record as "an example of the nicest ways of saying something ugly."
Release and reception
The album was released to warm critical reception. For example, the Los Angeles Times called Paris 1919 "the idiosyncratic pinnacle to Cale's thrilling yet perverse career, despite the fact it never topped the charts". Rolling Stone writer Stephen Holden remarked, "Paris 1919 is one of the most ambitious albums ever released under the name of 'pop'". He stated that the songwriting means that it "requires a great deal of listening in order for its full implications to be perceived", with the album ending up as a "masterpiece". Subsequent positive reviews continued to be published many years later. AllMusic critic Jason Ankeny gave the album four-and-a-half stars, praising 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." Paris 1919 received a full reissue on 19 June 2006 by Rhino Records UK. The revamped version features the original album remastered, in addition to the outtake "Burned Out Affair", alternate and rehearsal versions of every song on the album, a hidden, unlisted instrumental version of "Macbeth", and the sound effects of the chirping birds found in the title track. Notably, Pitchfork gave the reissue a 9.5 out of 10 rating.
Live performances
Cale has performed Paris 1919 live in its entirety throughout the world, beginning in Cardiff on 21 November 2009, with his regular band and a 19-piece orchestra,with new orchestral arrangements by Cale and composer Randall Woolf. The show was staged again in 2010 in London, Norwich, Paris, Brescia, Los Angeles, and Melbourne, then in 2011 in Barcelona, Essen, and Malmö, as well as two shows in New York City in January 2013.
