Song of Innocence

Song of Innocence is the debut album by American composer and producer David Axelrod. It was released in October 1968 by Capitol Records. In an effort to capitalize on the experimental climate of popular music at the time, Axelrod composed the album as a suite-like tone poem interpreting Songs of Innocence, a 1789 illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. Recording took place at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles with an orchestra and studio musicians from the Wrecking Crew collective, including keyboardist and conductor Don Randi, guitarist Al Casey, bassist Carol Kaye, and drummer Earl Palmer.

An instrumental jazz fusion record, Song of Innocence incorporates elements of classical, rock, funk, pop, and theatre music. Axelrod arranged the music for bass, drums, and string instruments, composing in a rock idiom with tempos centered on such rhythms played by Palmer. He used contrast in his orchestral compositions, interspersing their euphoric psychedelic R&B structures with dramatic, harrowing arrangements to reflect the supernatural themes found in Blake's poems. The resulting music's reverent, psychedelic overtones have been interpreted as evoking the poet's themes of innocence and spirituality.

While innovative for its application of rock and jazz techniques, Song of Innocence was not commercially successful and confounded contemporary critics, who viewed it as an ambitious but foolish curiosity piece. In the 1990s, critics reassessed the album as a classic, while leading disc jockeys in hip hop and electronica rediscovered and sampled its songs. "Holy Thursday", the record's best-known track, was frequently sampled by hip hop producers. The renewed interest in Axelrod's work prompted Stateside Records to reissue Song of Innocence in 2000.

In the 1960s, Axelrod worked as a producer and A&R executive for Capitol Records in Los Angeles. During this time, he began to conceive his own musical ideas, involving a fusion of baroque classical sounds, R&B rhythms, and spiritual themes. Challenged by what he described as a "new breed of record buyer ... more sophisticated in his thinking", he was one of several Los Angeles–based musical eccentrics during the late 1960s who wanted to expand on the mid-1960s studio experiments of Brian Wilson and George Martin. His first attempt at this creative vision was composing a religious-themed, psychedelic opera for the Electric Prunes, a local garage rock group. When the band found it too challenging to finish the recording, Axelrod enlisted studio musicians from the Wrecking Crew to complete the album, released as Mass in F Minor in 1968. The recording attracted both controversy and national fame for the producer.

After the success of Mass in F Minor, Axelrod was asked by Capitol to record a similar album. He wanted to further capitalize on the experimental climate of popular music and chose to adapt works by English poet William Blake on an album. Blake musical settings were at the height of their popularity among musicians and composers. Numerous serious music composers had set his poems to music since the 1870s, and the practice was eventually adapted in other musical fields during the 20th century, including popular music, musical theatre, and the 1960s folk idiom. Axelrod, a self-professed "Blake freak", had been fascinated by Blake's painting and poetry since his late teens and frequently read the poems as an adult. He conceived Song of Innocence after he had bought an edition of Blake's complete poetry while working in Capitol's art department and considered the concept for a few years before Mass in F Minor. Axelrod was not sociable with colleagues, such as record executives who could have helped him professionally, and felt that he could identify with Blake; he considered the poet "very bad at making new friends".

Axelrod composed Song of Innocence in one week and began recording in mid-1968. He recorded the album at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles with his close-knit group of veteran studio musicians from the Wrecking Crew, including keyboardist and conductor Don Randi, guitarist Al Casey, bassist Carol Kaye, and drummer Earl Palmer. He had worked with them before when producing sessions for Capitol recording artists.

Axelrod did not play any instruments on Song of Innocence; he instead wrote arrangements for his orchestra and utilized 33 players to perform his notated charts. He had learned how to read and orchestrate complex music charts from jazz musicians during the 1950s. Randi conducted the orchestra and played both piano and organ on the record. Axelrod preferred listening to a session from a recording booth like his contemporary Igor Stravinsky. "That way the sounds don't seem to go all over the place", he later said. "Music seems so small in a studio." Axelrod originally wanted some of the album's compositions to feature a large-scale choir but was uncertain if he could find the appropriate ensemble, so he recorded an entirely instrumental album and included one Blake setting for each section of the score.

A jazz fusion album, Song of Innocence combines jazz elements with impressionistic musical figures and hard rock guitar solos. Its music also incorporates funk, rock, theatre, and pop styles. Music journalists categorized the record as jazz-rock, baroque pop, and psychedelic R&B. John Murph of JazzTimes magazine said the music could be better characterized as art pop than jazz. Axelrod, who had produced bebop albums before working for Capitol, asserted that jazz played a crucial role in the music: "For years, all I did was jazz. When I first got in the record business, I was so into jazz that I had never heard Elvis Presley. I still probably listen to jazz more than anything else."