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Heard some murmurs that there's possibly a new Mike solo album.  Linked to tickets for his latest BB tour. 

 ::) :P :p :violin :thud :wall :whatever :whatever :whatever :shrug :old :brow

I Love that pun. Further lesser pun intended (besides being true). :)

Anyone have a track listing for this album.. ?

New track from "Mike Love Not War":

Mike Love - World Is My Family
https://youtu.be/SJYdK1JjPNc (https://youtu.be/SJYdK1JjPNc)

Including OSD? ;D

 
And the full album:

https://youtu.be/9sFsIlj0RJw

OMG !  No Pier Pressure...  is a classic after all. 

7 out of 10 of these songs were already on Unleash the Love. Not exactly a new album, unless they’re different recordings (and I’m not interested in listening to all of those songs twice to compare lol).

A possibly interesting tidbit regarding the amateurish cover art on this thing that looks like a fan-made 90s boot cover: When you look at the cover art at this site: https://www.musicredemptions.com/MikeLoveNotWar/

The metadata on the image appears to suggest the image dates from 2019. It also has a name for a photography studio that supposedly prepped the art. That same metadata also labels the art as "promotional art" for "Make Love Not War" (rather than "Mike...").

It almost feels like they promised a "new" album with 2023 tour tickets, then panicked and just grabbed a bunch of those 2004 unreleased solo album tracks, 7 out of 10 of which had already subsequently been re-purposed for the 2017 "Unleash the Love" album (and 9 out of 10 of which had already circulated from the circa 2004 set of solo recordings). And they also possibly may have just grabbed cheapo album cover art that was prepped years ago as well.

This new thing ostensibly has 3 wholly "new" tracks, only 1 of which fans haven't heard before, and it's almost like it only accidentally even has *that* many "new" songs.

It's like, even if they just wanted to not really do an actual "new" album for this, they could have created a more interesting solo "best of" or solo "rarities" collection.

Perplexing and interesting.

A lot of these songs make me think of Kids American TV shows from the 80s, 90s....California Dreams/Saved by the Bell style. Clumsy lyrics with bad production values.

Ironically, that circa 2004 Mike solo stuff is probably, at least some of it, his best solo stuff. I'll take "Cool Head" over "This Too Shall Pass" anyway.

Interestingly, while I'm not a huge fan of Christian Love's voice (I don't dislike it, I'm kind of ambivalent about it), the couple of a songs he sings on that 2004 collection (especially "Too Cruel") are better than the re-re-re-recorded versions Mike did on "Unleash the Love" later on.

I still think it would have worked well to have Al sing "Too Cruel" back in 2012 for the reunion album.

No offense to anybody who likes it (and I think its alright), but to me something like "Too Cruel" (at least in it's Mike Love Not War / Unleash The Love guise) sounds like something a dweeb in cargo shorts and flip flips would write while sitting under a tree on his acoustic while his buddies play frisbee. Even if Al did the lead, it still woulda been meh.

I think the use of "Daybreak Over The Ocean" was the correct choice, though I admit "Cool Head, Warm Heart" would've probably worked as well.

"Too Cruel" is not A+ material, and if the Beach Boys with Al had cut it, I would have preferred a re-record, or vast remix that undoes a lot of the dorky, immediately dated production elements on that 2004 track. The 1978 version of "Too Cruel" is a goofy arrangement too, ironically.

But honestly, there's a ton of dork/dweeb music from the band in the 80s and 90s (and 2000s), mostly coming from Mike's corner. I mean, cargo shorts and frisbees and flip flops pretty much describes the Mike Love-Terry Melcher aesthetic of the mid-80s through to the early-mid 90s, and subsequently a lot of Mike's later solo stuff as well).

"Too Cruel" has some catchy chords, a decent melody, and sounds like something that would have been in Al's vocal range. My thought of using it for TWGMTR was more about the logistical/utilitarian aspect of working some Mike track into the album for the sake of group/corporate politics.

"Cool Head" would have been a good one for the band to do as well (again, the Christian Love backing vocals on that one are right in Al's range), but that one had already been released (which is why "Waves of Love", another one that would have undoubtedly sounded good with the full band, was also kind of a non-starter).