Van Dyke Parks at World Café Live

For someone who relishes working behind the scenes and generally avoids interviews, Van Dyke Parks is an urbane, gentlemanly, articulate raconteur.

A few highlights from Parks' vast resumé, which reaches back to the early '60s: cowriting, with Brian Wilson, "Heroes and Villains" and other songs for the Beach Boys' Smile; producing albums for Phil Ochs, Ry Cooder, Rufus Wainwright, and Joanna Newsom; creating string arrangements for U2, Vic Chesnutt, Sam Phillips, and Silverchair; playing piano, accordion, or other keyboards on songs by the Byrds, Harry Nilsson, Matthew Sweet, and Frank Black; scoring numerous sound tracks; and releasing all-too-sporadic albums of eclectic and witty invention, beginning with 1968's celebrated Song Cycle.

But, remarkably, until now Parks had never toured.

"I've had some incredible recognition for a person who has always really treasured the blessings of anonymity. But this is the first tour," Parks says on the phone from a tour stop in Grand Rapids, Mich. "Why now? Because I'm 67. 'If not now, when?' is the question I would ask. And 'Why not?' is the next one. Because it's there!"

Opening for Parks Sunday night at World Cafe Live Upstairs is the Brooklyn chamber-pop band Clare and the Reasons, who lured the Los Angeles resident to the road. Clare is Clare Muldaur Manchon, daughter of folksinger Geoff Muldaur, whom Parks knew in the '60s, and some of the Reasons' string section will back Parks during his set.

Clare and the Reasons, according to Parks, are part of a new crop of "young moderns," artists who have "no fear of trying to acknowledge that music can still have a street sensibility and appear in a parlor. That hyphenate of plain and fancy, that's where I've found a lot of fieldwork in my life."

Parks has several projects in the works, and the tour is a prelude.

"The idea is, OK, take the rust off the hinge, look at this old stuff, and put this up for public inspection and judgment, but also bring new works."

In March, he plans to record his first album of new songs since Orange Crate Art, 1995's collaboration with Wilson, and it will reflect his "post-9/11 sensibility" and "righteous indignation." He's also working on a collection of previously unrecorded songs from the Depression era. But this tour "gives me a chance to promote these expired goods of my lifetime that I've never promoted," he says.

"I've spent 40 years in a monastic cell writing what I thought were valid works of freestanding emotive force for B pictures long forgotten and television series that have disappeared for good reason and a countless sea of arrangements," Parks says. "Now I'm 67 years old, and here comes a group of absolutely dynamite musicians with a sparkle of their own that basically puts the audience two feet off the ground before I even set foot on the stage - giving me the opportunity to pronounce at last, 'I've suffered like hell for my music for the last 40 years. Now it's your turn.' And that's my story, and I'm sticking to it."