It’s not uncommon for older folks to receive dementia diagnoses after back surgery.

Anyway, I think a lot of unhappy stuff started to snowball after 2015, and accelerated after the back surgery. And I strongly suspect Melinda was dealing with her own challenges in one way or another.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/brian-wilson-cause-death-revealed-175854173.html

🥺

Wow, he was in really bad shape! :-(

Yeah that was very hard to read. Seems like a fair bit of it stemmed from his kidneys , and that he’d been sick for longer than we knew.

Just occurred to me we still don’t know what happened to Melinda.

My heart goes out to their kids…I lost both my parents about the same length apart

I think Melinda’s passing has been surprisingly undiscussed. There are a lot of mysteries.

— Why wasn’t she seen in public after 2015?
— What role did or didn’t she have in BW’s career after that point?
— What actually happened with BW’s bad back surgery in 2018/19?
— Did BW face challenges a lot earlier than anyone suspected?

I suspect a lot of things went on over these final years that we may learn in times to come. And some will likely be really challenging to take.

The show played an unreleased BW original likely titled “Friday Night.” Imagine a combination of “I Just Got My Pay” and “Concert Tonight” sung by 2007 Brian. But better than that sounds.

Here’s my tribute. I hope you take a look and enjoy it.

https://kansasreflector.com/2025/06/16/how-beach-boys-mastermind-brian-wilson-changed-this-kansas-journalists-life/

I have an idea about what might be going on here. It's just based on a couple of pieces of information, so bear with me.

I believe that Joe Thomas was working on assembling another BW solo record at the time of his (Joe's) death. Scott Bennett -- who is going by another easily uncovered name on social media these days -- posted that the two had been in touch about unreleased material. Scott has also written that he's hoping to release a batch of TLOS-era songs soon.

Putting two and two together, I wonder if Joe was essentially deputizing teams of producers to whip BW outtakes into shape for that last record. We know the Life Suite material was left over from TWGMTR, and I've been assured by those in the know that there were tons of outtakes from NPP. Add those together with whatever material Scott might be sitting on, and you could have a really solid album.

I very much doubt Brian worked on any of this stuff within the past few years, but the new production team and the Jardines may well have been spiffing them up.

As posted here, Joe's death appears to have scuttled the project. But I do hope the recordings get out one way or another.

I am sad, yes, but overwhelmed with gratitude to have shared this timeline with Brian Wilson. As I grew older, I came to understand more about how one person's life can contain so many contradictions and complications, tragedies and triumphs. He was so very human. Brian and his bands (the Beach Boys, sure, but also the folks who toured with him for a quarter century beginning in 1999) created something special and lasting. Few others can say the same. Love to his friends and family, love to my fellow fans, love to us all. We sure need it.

Wow. When? Why? Who is the singer at 0:31?

Here are the answers, as I know them.

2008.

Recordings that Brian made at Gary Griffin's house with assorted band members and friends for several years.

Gary.

God, I love this question. I think that looking at the Wilson-Paley song list can give you a pretty good idea. Something like "It's Not Easy Being Me" was probably intended as a BW solo track. But something like "Desert Drive" clearly has vocal lines for the Boys. I also think that such an album would clearly have spots for Al or Mike or Bruce features, along with Brian's material. So something like the following seems plausible to me --

SOUL SEARCHIN' (The Beach Boys, 1996)

Soul Searchin'
You're Still a Mystery
Dancin' the Night Away / Baywatch Nights
Desert Drive
My Mary Anne
Proud Mary (we know he worked on this with Don Was)
Chain Reaction of Love
Saturday Morning in the City
I'm Broke (maybe? or possibly another BW tune)
And I Always Will / Jenny Clover (Al Jardine spot)
Glow Crescent Glow (or some Mike Love song)

Realistically, these were the songs that were most done and that could have incorporated the '90s BB voices most successfully. At least to my ears!

Pretty sure the Peggy Sue reference is to a rough mix / alternate version that was accidentally released on a 1991 reissue of MIU. You can find it here: https://youtu.be/UjhXCFRD7Gg?si=oM9mA9OXbG9tXxlv

So, what happened with this? We should have gotten a release in 2024 but obviously didn't. Will the above leaked recordings be part of a larger release for 2025?

These recordings were not leaked. They were officially released, albeit in a minuscule and temporary way.

Al going on tour with Brian's band would be lovely. I fondly remember the NYC Beacon Theater they all did in 2019, with e.g. deep cuts from Friends and Surf's Up sprinkled among the hits. He seems to be describing something similar here (Roller Skating Child, lol!). Really hope it can happen!

The question is whether anyone in Brian's band knows.

I think that the best definition of SMiLE ever is "the album too beautiful to ever be actually heard". Don't know who said that, just know that it was not myself.

But, it was exactly what I thought when I first listened to Disc 2 of the Good Vibrations box in 1993, and never changed idea about that. I am no revisionist, and don't spit on miracles.

The Smile music on that box set practically levitates. It astonished me then and now.

The '93 set should be cast in gold somewhere. It's so good.

It can be easy to recall that Brian was, for a good decade or so, a bigger name than the Beach Boys. In some ways, he was more commercial. If you look at the vibe around him in the mid-90s, then the way Imagination and the touring band were received, then the Pet Sounds live shows -- he was building a juggernaut. The shows were often bigger than the BBs, and he landed major label deals for all of his projects.

The other piece, of course, is that popular music itself shifted from ‘67-‘68, from elaborate psychedelia to more stripped down takes. John Wesley Harding, White Album, Beggars Banquet, the emergence of country rock. This was a big part of Paul Williams’ contemporaneous take — Brian couldn’t have gone back to the big sound, because he was still trying at some level to play the game. Smiley was, in a very real sense, him moving with the times. Both it and BWPS, in their own ways, have as much a right to be called Smile — or performances of the same — as the original sessions.

A topic about which much can be — and has been, and will be — written.

One point: The average age of onset for bipolar disorder is 25. How old was Brian in the heat of the Smile sessions? 25.

His most accurate diagnosis has, to my knowledge, been bipolar with some schizoaffective features (the auditory hallucinations).

Regardless of who said what to him or what he himself believed, regardless of the work being done, it all happened at an absolute crisis point in his mental health. Yes, he continued to function well for several years afterward. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t struggling or competent to deal with what was happening in his own mind.

Adam, your work on these videos seriously compares to "Revolution in the Head" or some of Lewisohn's work on the Beatles. Seriously some of the best I've ever seen.

The album and tour were outstanding. We were lucky to receive what we got.

The only downside was the lack of a definitive filmed document of a show, but you can’t have everything. In hindsight, I think I choose to draw the curtain of my fandom there.

I think this all comes down to a very basic question: what do you prefer? I remember being on the other side of debates about this for years when it came to pitch correction. I believed at the time (and still believe) that fixing flubbed notes via technology is no big deal. Many other folks disagreed. The reason those debates went on and on without any real resolution was that neither side was objectively correct or incorrect. It boiled down to what you liked or didn’t like.

At this stage, AI Beach Boys songs usually feature a familiar backing track with a lead vocal run through a processor that makes someone sound vaguely like someone else. It’s the equivalent of wearing a rubber mask. Yeah, if you squint, it looks like the person, but everyone understands there’s no way it can be. If the fantasy of The Beach Boys or Brian Wilson singing certain songs in different eras or with different stylistic approaches means so much to you, I don’t think you’re a bad person for creating AI mixes or enjoying them. I’ve enjoyed some of them myself.

But there’s no way that what’s being produced has anything to do with how we’ve traditionally understood the creation of recorded music. It might end up putting musicians out of business, and there’s also nothing that I can do about that. But I can just say at this point, what my preference is.

Some efforts work better than others, and some are more defensible from an artistic perspective than others.

But overall, I liken AI enthusiasts to the folks who create 300 alternate Smile mixes. You’re not harming anyone, but it’s sure not how I would choose to spend my time. And much of the material has little to no aesthetic value.

Real recordings of real people for the win.

Darian has done soundtrack work for many years, often contributing to odd Disney programs.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that nearly all the vocals on TWGMTR, except for a handful of featured spots, are Brian and Jeff Foskett. It’s how they got it done so quickly, and with minimum static from the other guys. Again, not doubting the presence of Mike and Al and Bruce, because they can all be heard clearly at various points, just that the overall stack on those tracks is 90% plus Brian and Jeff.

No young Brian on old Brian songs. Please.

The old BW songs gain their power from him being, well, old.

To his credit, Dae Lims gets this and has been very careful in his approach. Desert Drive is a full latter day BB version. The Like in I Love You have been given a full band treatment, but it’s not even a BW melody. His L&M toured the history of BW vocal approaches. That’s all amazing and excellent.

But putting a young BW on MAD, for example, or the Paley tracks — it just doesn’t work or make aesthetic sense. The young BW wouldn’t have written or produced those songs.

Oddly, the version of What a Wonderful World released on the OCA deluxe edition was different than the previously booted one. No orchestra.

It seems to me that if Brian had been diagnosed with dementia, the court filing would have said so -- not that he suffers a "major neurocognitive disorder (such as dementia)". Clearly the filing needs to establish a basis for a conservatorship to achieve its purpose, and the legal hurdle to be cleared is that his cognitive challenges be in the ballpark of dementia. Presumably it's for the courts to decide if that's the case, but the filing tells us only that Brian indeed has such challenges, a fact that's been obvious for decades.

William, I was much of your opinion, but it appears we're grasping at straws. Jean Sievers confirmed to the New York Times that Brian is indeed suffering from dementia. He is also taking Aricept, which is a daily treatment to slow the progression of Alzheimer's.

This all makes me wonder. Not wonder about Brian's bravery and determination, for he has those to spare.

But I wonder about me, and about so many of us who wanted to see Brian do well. If I look back honestly, the shows I saw him do in 2009 were incredible -- the best ever -- but even the BB50 dates didn't quite reach that level. And everyone could see that he was lagging by the 2013 Beck tour, and each subsequent jaunt saw him do a little worse. Yes, he would rally time after time, and you could always see some of the old spirit and verve. But he was growing older, and the performances objectively declined.

Then we come to 2022, and anyone who saw those shows knew something was seriously wrong. Perhaps it had started a couple of years earlier with the back surgery, but no one could deny the difficulty that he now faced. And I just wonder. Should we have been firmer about pushing back from 2015-2019, when it was clear he was doing okay -- broadly speaking -- but going through the motions a bit at the shows? I hate to think that we encouraged him to go out when he was scared and unprepared and uncomprehending.

Who knows. Perhaps he wanted it. I'm sure at times he did. But I think those of us who love him, those of us devoted to this man's music, have to be a little self critical now. I wish it wasn't true. But it is.