same here! in the first week of release i listened all the way thru 15 times!!! now i'm down to one a day. i always think of it as a concept album all the way thru, makes it more profound. Here's how i interpret it, accurate or not doesn't matter to me.
Think About the Days - Brian melancholy about something, but don't know what.
TWGMTR - turns the radio on, gets in a good mood.
Isn't it Time - after getting in a good musical mood, wants to get the band back together.
Spring Vacation - band back together. all is good.
Private Life of Bill and Sue - Brian watches reality tv after the gigs.
Shelter - needs shelter, just like when he was young, but now for different reason - world gone mad (reality tv, etc).
Daybreak - M. Love also sad, just part of the theme.
Beaches in Mind - need to escape from this new mad world, run to the beach.
Strange World - expresses the strangeness encountered in previous songs.
From There to Back Again - i picture this as Al singing to Brian. Al feels same way as him about things.
Pacific Coast Highway - Brian says goodbye to the world. now we know why he was melancholy.
Summer's Gone - i imagine this to be after his death. either at a funeral or in an after-life.
maybe everybody listens to it this way, i don't know. in any event, makes the song sequence totally appropriate.
This is my first post....I'm from Indiana, and I have been a BB fan ever since I discovered their music at the age of ten (in 1979)!
Oily Pig's breakdown is a cool way to summarize the theme of the album--of course, we can't know for sure if Brian
was actually thinking this way, but I kind of had some of those thoughts in mind myself when I played it! As to my opinion of the new CD, it's certainly the most consistent BB album since TBBLY from 1977. Except for
Summer in Paradise, all of the BB albums since TBBLY had
some great songs, but the impact of said gems was marred by too many mediocre-to-just plain embarrassing moments to make them albums that I could listen to from beginning-to-end. While I like some songs on TWGMTR better than others, I can honestly that there isn't a single "stinker" in the bunch...this is the first BB album since TBBLY that I can pop in the player and just play from start-to-finish! Everything fits, and each song has something to recommend it--even the one song that Mike wrote ("Daybreak Over the Ocean") is listenable. It's not
great, but it's good, and I hear it as the way "Kokomo"
should have sounded (but didn't, of course)! If it does turn out to be their last CD, it's a great way for them to bow out
(if they choose to do so).
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