The Bird and the Bee's Inara George teams with baroque-pop legend Van Dyke Parks on An Invitation, a record inspired by the French chanteuse Édith Piaf. After George watched the Piaf documentary La Vie en Rose, she asked Parks to help recreate that sense of the solitary songstress, unencumbered and alone at the microphone, the music magically radiating from offstage. Handed a demo tape, Parks returned with arrangements that tracked every twist and turn of George's vocals with painstaking precision.

A 28-piece orchestra, heavy on strings, evokes both the Technicolor wonderlands of the Sherman Brothers and the rambling urbanity of Kurt Weill. Recorded in two days at LA's Sunset Sound studio, the room where Parks and George's father Lowell George (of Little Feat) first worked together, the album was produced by Mike Andrews, who considers An Invitation the father-daughter record the Georges never got to make.

With her steady, crystalline voice, George sounds like the still center of a swirling one-woman musical, fusing Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and Copland into an unmistakably American idiom, spotlighting her as a sophisticated new voice and confirming Parks as an inexhaustibly vital national treasure.