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• Brian Wilson: The Essential Album Guide
A few days after his 66th birthday, Brian Wilson cruises along Mulholland Drive in his black Mercedes coupe, listening to an oldies station and thinking about global warming. There's a heat wave in L.A., with temperatures in the high 90s and wildfires burning up the coast. "It's not supposed to be this hot in June," Wilson mutters. Hot wind blows through the car's open windows, and torn-up receipts fly around the floor. "What if it gets to be 130 degrees in July? Would you consider that to be a disaster? I'd say that's a disaster." He sighs deeply. "It could be the end of L.A. — the end of life. This could be it! Oh, my God, it's terrible."
If Wilson is worried about climate change, you wouldn't know it from listening to his new album, That Lucky Old Sun, a musical love letter to his native Los Angeles. The place he describes is not the smog-and-traffic-choked Southern California of 2008, but a paradise of sun goddesses, open highways and coyotes howling in the hills. "I wanted to capture the mood of L.A., the way I like to think of it," he says. Songs like "Forever She'll Be My Surfer Girl," backed by lush vocal harmonies and orchestral pop arrangements, revisit his own Sixties hits with the Beach Boys. Others, such as the hymnlike "Southern California," imagine what life might be like if things had turned out differently — if his brothers, fellow Beach Boys Dennis and Carl, were still alive and if his own life hadn't collapsed into decades of illness and isolation.
Two of the best songs, "Can't Wait Too Long" and "Oxygen to the Brain," offer clues about Wilson's improved state of mind today: "Let yourself float/Don't carry that weight," he sings in "Oxygen," in a voice that's stronger than it has sounded in 30 years. "Never destroy when you can create." Because for all the album's nostalgia, That Lucky Old Sun is also about Wilson coming to terms with his own life now — and trying to rediscover his muse before it's too late. "It seems like 'God, I gotta get going before I die,' " Wilson says over breakfast at his favorite deli. "Thinking about not being around much longer makes me depressed."
Wilson is dressed in black Puma jogging pants and a crisp Hawaiian shirt, with a Cartier bracelet gleaming on his wrist. His face is tan, and he says he's in great shape. "I walk five miles a day," he says. "I weigh in at about 218, and I just had my 66th birthday. I don't look it, but I had it."
Wilson has made great personal strides from a decade ago, when performing terrified him and he was ambivalent about making new music. People close to Wilson say the biggest change came in 2004, after he completed his masterwork, Smile — the legendary album he abandoned in 1967. "It was like removing a cancerous growth from his soul," says Scott Bennett, who's played with Wilson since 1998 and co-wrote much of That Lucky Old Sun.
"He's much more confident," adds Jeffrey Foskett, the leader of Wilson's band and a friend since the mid-1970s. "I think what really changed it is the standing ovation he got after performing Smile at Royal Festival Hall [in London in 2004]. That's where he said, 'Wow, they really do like it.' I think he finally realized people really love him."
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The new disc began in Bennett's bedroom studio in the summer of 2006, while Wilson's wife, Melinda, and their three kids were on vacation. "He'd come over, and we'd have a Corona and get to work," says Bennett. "I think Brian thrived on the fact that we weren't anywhere there were going to be people peeking in and celebrities showing up — it was just him and me in a bedroom, and he was, like, on fire."
While the concept was to make a record about Southern California, Bennett says Wilson's lyrical ideas often led them in more personal directions. "He set the tone on songs like 'Oxygen to the Brain' — that confessional thing," Bennett says. "He was willing to admit, 'Hey, I lost it for a while. . . .' So I thought, 'OK, he's willing to go there.' "
"To me," he adds, "what moves people about Brian Wilson, beyond the beautiful melodies and harmonies, is 'Here's Brian Wilson. He's survived; he's alive.' I wanted this record to encapsulate that."
Wilson brought in his longtime collaborator Van Dyke Parks to write the spoken-word narrations and some songs. After most of the record was together, Darian Sahanaja, a band member who was Wilson's main collaborator on Smile, helped shape the material into a similarly interwoven, thematic song cycle. "I think it's very beautiful, very spiritual," Wilson says. "It gives me a good feeling."
After breakfast, Wilson says he's got to get home to pack because he's flying to Europe tonight to start his summer tour. But on the way, he changes his mind, pulls a U-turn in the middle of Mulholland and heads down Benedict Canyon because he feels like driving past the Bel-Air house where he lived in the 1970s. As we pass Cielo Drive, I point out that it's where Charles Manson's Family murdered the actress Sharon Tate in 1969. "My brother Dennis was friends with Manson," Wilson deadpans. "I don't think he had anything to do with it, though." Wilson turns onto Sunset Boulevard, then onto Bellagio, and stops in front of the old Spanish-style mansion where he spent some of his bleakest years, when he often stayed in bed for weeks at a time. He admits he drives by here fairly often. "I think about the past a lot," he says. "Some memories are good, but other ones hurt like hell."
On the way back home, I ask Wilson if he can imagine a time he'll retire. "I can't retire," he says. "If I retired I wouldn't have anything to do. It's still hard for me. It's a struggle. But I gotta keep singing."
"I'm working on a new album now," he says later, as we get near his house. "It's called Pleasure Island: A Rock Fantasy. It's about some guys who took a hike, and they found a place called Pleasure Island. And they met all kinds of chicks, and they went on rides and — it's just a concept. I haven't developed it yet. I think people are going to love it — it could be the best thing I've ever done."
[From Issue 1061 — September 18, 2008]