Don’t forget that he was grieving Ronnie Spector while performing Be My Baby night after night.

Something happened during the break.

They took a week or so off around July 4. The shows up to then had been uneven, from reports, but you could see BW working hard. His 80th birthday show, which I saw, was more than fine. You could see the cracks, but they were papered over fairly well.

That being said, from all reports things worsened after that break. You can usually expect BW to catch fire at some point during a tour — it happened in 2019, there were some good reports last year. But it didn’t happen this time. Went the other way.

It’s not just physical, though. He’s going through some stuff, and it should be clear to anyone. That’s why it feels weird to discuss.

If I had to guess what is the most major factor upsetting him right now, I would bet that he’s obsessing over being so close to the end of his life.

Brian has said in interviews that the idea of growing old and dying scares the crap out of him. He really did not look happy in that video in which the members of Chicago presented him with the birthday cake. And that break might be when he was able to ruminate and it may have really hit him then.

There is something sadly beautiful about the section where Brian sings in that clip. He does get stuck and drops one line, but that’s the only time that I’ve heard him sing that section without messing it up rhythmically, or just singing the first line, or forgetting to sing the section altogether.  He’s actually quite focused here, and he sounds really nice.

I preordered mine back in april. It arrived about three weeks ago.

Amazon and walmart and the like ran out days after the physical release and i was told more were coming.
 I did try to help a friend out and found a place about two weeks ago that had it in stock. I have no clue if they still have it in stock. Here is the info current the first of this month:

Thanks for the info, Steve— I ordered it.

Too bad you can’t go to, say, lakeshorerecords.com and just order it. That would make it a lot easier for the perhaps 300 other people who want this and are presumably also having trouble finding it.

So is the soundtrack ever having a physical release? I thought it was supposed to come out a couple of weeks ago, but Google shows no signs of its existence.

I forgot about the Colbert appearance. Brian at peak concentration in his comfort zone.

Going to choose what I say carefully, as this type of speculation makes me extremely uncomfortable but …

I’ve noticed a huge decline just from October. And hell, even from early last month (and that was a giant drop off from last fall). On a 4th of July photo I saw Brian looked alright but his hands didn’t look quite right, like due to paralysis. But…I have also seen him use his hands to adjust himself in his seat , and seen footage of him leaving with a walker. So…yeah I don’t know what this is about.  I’m starting to have an idea based on certain things I’ve noticed but I hope I’m wrong

Feel like I’m going to be sick

It’s been a few years since he’s given an interview, besides the occasional appearance with Brett Wilson on a zoom screen for a few minutes.

Has he been on camera extensively since the LPR footage, which I think was from 2017/2018? Only appearance I can think of is Love and Mercy/Do It Again in 2020, which was actually pretty good. He played the piano pretty well and I thought he looked good, having lost some weight.

Wtf?!

I have some …questions… but at this point in time I’m not sure the best way to phrase anything
[/quote]
Right. I think we don’t know the whole picture. His posture has deteriorated and he is no longer playing the piano in concert, as far as I know.

Not yet noted has been the addition of the black “privacy cloth” under the piano, concealing Brian’s hands and legs from the audience.

A lot of people wishing Brian a happy birthday, wherever he may be. Where he actually is is doing a concert in Kansas City tonight. He’s done a lot of concerts on his birthday. I guess it keeps him from dwelling about his mortality when he’s busy.

June 7, Phoenix, AZ:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=evx9dWcKpHw

Quite a decline from last year, I’m afraid. Particularly in the second half.

Good Vibrations:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v7FbtF3OTvU

Brian seems rested and focused. During the last tour his spirit had pretty much left his body by this point in the show.

Looks like that video was just posted, but comes from the December 2018 Christmas tour. It would help if the people posting the videos put the date in the actual video title instead of only in the description; I've run into this myself, seeing what I think is a new v ideo only to find someone has randomly just posted a live video from several years back.

Thanks. I actually searched for videos posted in the last day, and that’s what
I got. 

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The beginning part seems to have been crafted to get revenge on Michael McDonald and to haunt his dreams forever.

Here’s something I thought of when GOK came out last month, thinking about why this album might be happening right now.

Brian was pretty good at supporting himself on the piano in one-off performances through the late 80s and early to mid 90s. Here’s when the problem started: I remember a performance of your imagination on David Letterman in 1998 in which Brian started playing during the first verse, got kind of locked up on the first chord, and either his mike was faded down quickly or he stopped playing for the rest of the song. (In 94 or 95 on the same show, he did a great job with Do It Again.)

Next: 1999. He pounded the same chord on the piano in his very first solo concerts for the entire show without moving his hands (I mean this literally: footage shows his hands locked on A major for 2 hours) and was of course not plugged in or was turned completely down. After that he stopped playing altogether during shows. A couple of years later, I think, he started playing Surfer Girl audibly. By 2010 he was noodling on the keyboard through at least half of the show. I think he has may have tapered off again in the last couple of years, but still plays much more than he used to.

Related: we know that his voice went through several stages since the late 60s, getting to its weirdest sound in the early 90s. By 1998 he was suddenly singing pretty but sounded kind of tired. He sounded slurry for a few years (sometimes attributed to changes in his meds), but made a huge improvement which started after SMiLE got out of his system. Lucky Old Sun was much better than prior albums vocally. I think the Disney album was his very strongest album vocally. He was 100% free of anything that had ever made his voice sound weird by then. Since then he’s done some weird speak-singing during the Pet Sounds shows, but other than Run, James, Run (which was pretty good, although it sounded like he was singing gently), we don’t really know how he sounds in the studio now.

So why this recording, and why now? I think Brian is probably keenly aware that people see his limitations at the keyboard, and he has seldom if ever played very exposed and intricate parts on his albums in quite a long time. I feel like he’s trying to prove himself as a keyboardist by putting himself out there as a soloist, however much editing/overdubbing is involved. I think this is therapeutic for him, and perhaps when he wraps up his career he wants to leave no unresolved issues.

.

I also think that they should give Brian some slight vocal tuning on these live shows, it's not a bad thing

Problem with that is, if Brian is more than a quarter step off (which he often is), the autotune will flip him to the wrong note altogether, and it sounds like butt. (Remember the first few months of C50?)

Somebody would need to be at the board constantly reprogramming the autotune to the scale of the song currently being sung— diatonic plus any intended accidentals.

It was a good mix if you want to study Christian Love’s occasional guitar plinkings.

I saw them several years ago after they had just absorbed Jeff Foskett, and their vocal blend was on point. This was pretty much just a hootenanny tonight.

Brian’s lost a LOT of weight, and is not in his wheelchair. 

Never noticed this before, but he uses a lot of finger substitution in the left hand for Love and Mercy. In other words, he’ll put one finger on a note and switch to another finger before he releases the note, in order to make the downward scales easier and more comfortable to play. That’s a fairly advanced piano-playing technique.

 Verse 2 of “I’m Waiting for the Day.” He goes from 23-year-old Brian to 60-year-old Brian and back again.

GIOMH is truly the ultimate Brian solo album— the elusive Phil Spector-sounding rock and roll album. Brian and the band cut loose, mostly free of autotune and Joe Thomas. The much-maligned City Blues rocks harder than most any other Brian track, and Clapton’s pyrotechnical masturbation fits perfectly and sounds great.

Out-of-tune vocals? Sure, for 2004, but compare them to any random Ronettes song. Speaking of which, Brian does a killer Ronnie at the end of Fairy Tale— sounds almost like a placeholder for her to do her own vocal there, which would have been killer.

Even the Paley songs work, if you set aside the more vocally-alert originals. The fact that the original instrumental tracks were reused (while it was claimed that they were all new recordings) is really peculiar, particularly to those who have ears and/or software.

Overall, this is THE BW party record. Free of artifice and eminently crankable.

My personal favourite on this collection is 'You're Making Me Harder'

Great little sing along.

That’s not what he’s saying at all. Grow up.

It’s “You’re MAKIN’ Me Harder.”

I miss ghost.

Hi

I'm really interested to know if this RSD 17 release sounds any better than the same tracks on the POB 3 LP blue vinyl release ?

 

I haven't heard the blue, but the new version sounds freaking amazing-- the pressing is about as good as any album I own.

And in my opinion, colored vinyl usually sucks. Not this one.