The Smiley Smile Message Board

One of my biggest gripes with Unleash The Love is the obvious laziness, with Good Vibrations. On the "gentle world" line, there is this weird hiss.

This morning I was watching the video of The Beach Boys playing at that Memorial Day concert from 2016, and the same line in the song has the hiss.

Did Mike just use the playback track from 2016 for his album track?


2016 "live" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF8JIoAp310

2017 Unleash The Love release - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-SE5oPS4K4

Very interesting observation. Doing a quick listen to the first minute of each, it sounds like the exact same track (except for the symphonic backing at the 2016 National Memorial Day Concert), replete with the same easily noticeable autotune on Mike's lead. The hiss is there on both tracks as well, although fading more gradually on the concert performance while more prominent and ending more abruptly on the Unleash the Love version.

The guys must have been lip-syncing for the concert performance, with the same track used for the album. Are the other concert performance tracks the same as the Unleash the Love tracks, minus the symphonic backing?

Wow, I'm so glad we have detectives to listen so close! I used to be like that but in my old age, I just haven't got time! Good Job fellows!

This all makes sense. That 2016 performance clearly wasn't live, and we also know that Mike has been working on this most recent (and ultimately released) iteration of his solo album for several years now.

As I mentioned back around the time that album was announced, what will be interesting to see is if Mike pursues licensing his solo recordings for use in TV commercials/movie trailers/movies/TV shows, etc. as a cheaper alternative to licensing the original BB masters.

That was the main reason behind Jeff Lynne re-recording ELO tracks a few years ago.

However, Lynne had a number of things going for him that Mike's recordings don't. Lynne's recordings were baseline high quality (few would say they prefer them to the originals, but they're all well-made and well-performed recordings), were pretty darn close in sound to the original versions (both in terms of Lynne's voice and the backing tracks), and most importantly can be released/used under the ELO name. None of these are true of Mike's recordings.

Plus, while I don't know anything about Lynne's re-recordings and how they were received by the public, Mike has the unfortunate distinction of having the badness of the remakes go viral and become a "thing" on the internet thanks to Stereogum, so I kinda feel like that won't exactly help these other Mike re-recordings get more licensing opportunities.

So, Mike used a lipsynced performance of the pseudo-"Beach Boys" for a release on the second disc of a "solo" release? Have I gotten it straight?

Yeah...... :-\

Yes, but I'd probably term it in reverse. By the time of that TV performance in 2016, I'm guessing Mike had already recorded the remake of the song for his then-upcoming solo CD set, so they just used that recording for the TV show. Kill two birds with one stone more or less. Subsequently, the track was in fact released on his CD set in 2017.

So I don't think it was a case of putting together his solo CD set and saying "Hey, let's just be lazy and use that track we made for that TV show last year."

Rather, it was a case of  "Let's be lazy and re-record a bunch of old BB songs to tack onto my solo CD, and oh yeah, we'll be doing this TV show way before the album comes out, but might as well use the track we already recorded since the show requires us to mime anyway."

Gotcha...he passed a solo recording off as a live Beach Boys performance

Correct.  :lol

Unfortunately, it appears the license to tour would allow him to lip-synch to the entire "Looking Back with Love" album as "The Beach Boys" if he wanted to.

Unleash the Laziness...  ;)

Disgusting