 In 2017, "Song Cycle" was ranked the 93rd greatest album of the 1960s by "Pitchfork".In Los Angeles during the mid-1960s, Van Dyke Parks became known as an in-demand session pianist, working with such artists as The Byrds, Tim Buckley, and Paul Revere & the Raiders.At the same time, he had been unsatisfied with contemporary pop music and its increasing submissiveness to the British invasion, going so far as to say, "apart from "Pet Sounds" I didn't find anything striking coming out of the United States."