1. Sunflower
2. Pet Sounds
3. The Smile Sessions
4. Friends
5. Surf's Up
6. That Lucky Old Sun
7. Smiley Smile
8. Wild Honey
9. Today!
10. That's Why God Made The Radio

1. God Only Knows
2. Surf's Up
3. Time To Get Alone
4. This Whole World
5. Forever
6. Wouldn't It Be Nice
7. I Get Around
8. Cabinessence
9. Break Away
10. Good Vibrations

1. God Only Knows
2. Surf's Up
3. Time To Get Alone
4. This Whole World
5. Wouldn't It Be Nice

Record Store Day started of as a really good initiative, but nowadays they should just call it Ridiculously Overpriced Re-Issue Day. And I can never find the few releases that I really want. So I didn't ever bother going to a record store on Record Store Day this year. I'd pretty much forgotten about the Bambu double-LP when I walked into my local record store today, but to my surprise, there was a copy in a box of RSD leftovers.

I found the CD/DVD set in a record store today.

Interesting thing is that the back cover mentions that the band includes "long time-Beach Boys sidemen" Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, while there's not a word about Al.

Tracklisting:

CD:
01. Our Prayer
02. Heroes & Villains
03. Sloop John B
04. Dance Dance Dance
05. Good Vibrations
06. This Beautiful Day
07. Marcella
08. Wild Honey
09. Sail On Sailor
10. Sail Away
11. Half Moon Bay
12. Don't Talk
13. The Right Time
14. Wouldn't It Be Nice
15. Help Me Rhonda
16. Fun Fun Fun
17. California Girls (CD only)
18. California Saga (CD only)
19. All Summer Long

DVD:
01. Our Prayer
02. Heroes And Villains
03. Sloop John B
04. Dance Dance Dance
05. Good Vibrations
06. This Beautiful Day
07. Runaway Dancer (DVD only)
08. Don't Worry Baby (DVD only)
09. Marcella
10. Wild Honey
11. Sail On Sailor
12. Sail Away
13. Half Moon Bay
14. Don't Talk
15. Saturday Night (DVD only)
16. Hold On Dear Brother (DVD only)
17. Darlin' (DVD only)
18. On The Island (DVD only)
19. God Only Knows (DVD only)
20. The Right Time
21. Wouldn't It Be Nice
22. Help Me Rhonda
23. All Summer Long
24. Fun Fun Fun
25. Pacific Coast Highway (DVD only)
26. Summer's  Gone (DVD only)

I really like the idea of a final Beach Boys or Brian Wilson album going full circle with a cover that references the 'Surfin' Safari' cover. Like a "this is where the journey that started with 'Surfin' Safari' ends" thing.

Henry Rollins is one of my biggest heroes. If you ever get the chance to see one of his spoken word performances, go see him. He's always amazing.

1. God Only Knows
2. Surf's Up
3. Time To Get Alone
4. This Whole World
5. Wouldn't It Be Nice

My girlfriend and I traveled through Ecuador for three weeks, but I didn't see any record stores at all.

Did you look down all the little streets? ask at the torist info places? check the phone books?  

  were you roughing it, or staying in swanky hotels?  Sensing you had a great time in any case!  

We're always roughing it. We just book our flights and never plan beforehand what we'll do between the flight there and the flight home. We stay in the cheapest hostels we can find, and do everything by foot or the cheapest type of public transport. I've had other type of holidays, where I stayed in five star hotels and all in resorts, but it's just a lot more fun this way. You really get to know the country and you come home with much better stories.

So yeah, we saw a lot of little streets. Unfortionately, the few music stores I saw only sold copied CDs and/or ridiculously expensive American imports...

And I got to see Love & Mercy and the Wrecking Crew documentary on the flight back home. That was pretty cool.

My girlfriend and I traveled through Ecuador for three weeks, but I didn't see any record stores at all.

Unfortionately, they played UB40 non stop...

Leo Blokhuis is a Dutch TV personality who has compiled several double CDs with (mostly) obscure songs that he likes. 'Time To Get Alone' is on one of them:

http://www.bol.com/nl/p/sleeping-beauties-song-s-we-shouldn-t-forget/1000004006480633/

I listened to TLOS non stop for weeks after it came out and I still absolutely love it. Same thing for TWGMTR. Not counting BWPS/TSS, those might actually be my two favorite Beach Boys or Beach Boys related albums since Sunflower.

But NPP is a different story. I listened to it four times on the day I got it and once on the day after that, I didn't like it and I haven't played it since. Very disappointing album that I rank somewhere in GIOMH's neighborhood.

Not every interview or article can be written by an expert, or a hardcore fan. The guy did his homework to the best of his ability

He did not. I think that "doing your homework" when it comes to Brian Wilson means that you should at least read his Wikipedia page once. If he would've done that, he would've known that Brian is deaf in his right ear.

One of my favorites is that Brian once signed an album for Don Henley, wrote "To a great musician" on it, looked at Henley, scratched "great", wrote "good" instead, and handed him the album...

BTW, I find it rather interesting that Smiley doesn't make the cut!   

The only reason why it didn't make the cut for me is because my five favorite songs on it are also on The Smile Sessions.

All Summer Long
Today
Pet Sounds
Wild Honey
Friends
Sunflower
Surf's Up
The Smile Sessions
That's Why God Made The Radio
That Lucky Old Sun

I don't know if Al really ever "switched", I guess it just depended on what the main problem was. If the band wasn't functioning well because of drug and alcohol abuse, Al would obviously pick Mike's and Bruce's side. If there was a discussion about the creative direction of the band, he might've been inclined to stick with the Wilsons.

Funny thing is that I started listening to The Beach Boys because it sounded like the opposite of punk rock to me. For years my life was all about punk rock and hardcore. I played in three hardcore bands at the same time which meant that I had to rehearse or play shows five or six nights a week, and even in my spare time I was constantly listening to punk rock and hardcore. Around 2004 I REALLY needed something that sounded radically different, and Sunflower turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. It was soft, smooth, sunny, friendly, polished, sophisticated, rich, warm, positive, deep, layered... Pretty much everything that punk rock wasn't.

[outtake]

I don't hear SURF'S UP as a step down from SUNFLOWER. Less cohesive maybe, but does the 1970 LP contain a single tune as good as "Surf's Up", "Til I Die" or "Feel Flows"? Or an outtake as good as "Wouldn't It Be Nice to Live Again"?

I love every song on Sunflower. I think that all twelve songs are suberb in their own way. Surf's Up on the other has just ten songs, four of which I could live without (Don't Go Near the Water, Take a Load Off Your Feet, Student Demonstration Time, A Day in the Life of a Tree). And going from twelve great songs to just six is a pretty big step down, if you ask me.

And indeed, nothing on Sunflower is as good as the song Surf's Up. But on the other hand, no other song on Surf's Up is as good as This Whole World, Forever or All I Wanna Do, IMO.

Not all necessarily "worse", but IMO at least not as good:

Little Deuce Coupe
Christmas Album
Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)
Party!
Smiley Smile
20/20
Surf's Up
Carl And The Passions "So Tough"
15 Big Ones
MIU Album
Keepin' The Summer Alive
The Beach Boys
Summer In Paradise

After my first three listens I'm sorry to say that so far, I think it's a dissapointing album. I love 'That Lucky Old Sun' and 'That's Why God Made The Radio' to death, so I really expected this to be considerably better than it is, to be honest... I hope it'll grow on me some more, since several songs on TWGMTR also needed some time, but anyway:

This Beautiful Day: Sounds a bit like 'Summer's Gone'. Not one of Brian's most convincing vocals, but still a decent album intro.
Runaway Dancer: Just painful. I hate it. Absolutely hate it. This just might be the very worst song that Brian ever had anything to do with in his life. I was in my teens in the 1990s and I absolutely despised all that electronic dance music that my peers were listening to. So it almost feels like betrayal to hear electronic beats and synths like those on a Brian Wilson album. Oh, and I also hate saxophones.
Whatever Happened: Even after Al's solo album and TWGMTR, it's still a thrill to hear a brand new song with more than one Beach Boy singing on it. This song does sound a bit like an Imagination outtake though. And that's not a good thing.
On The Island: Nice one. Very sunny, very mellow, a bit wacky (in a good way), has a bit of a Busy Doin' Nothing vibe. And I love Zooey's voice. Downside is that it sounds like a She & Him song with Brian guesting on backing vocals, rather than a Brian Wilson song.
Half Moon Bay: A bit too jazzy for my taste, but still pleasant enough.
Our Special Love: Yuck. Comes way too close to R&B (not the real rhtyhm & blues, but the slick modern kind) and whatever all those boy bands (Take That, Boyzone) were making in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Right Time: Pleasant song, Al sounds great as always. The chorus sounds a bit too much like Lay Down Burden, though.
Guess You Had To Be There: So far, this is hands down my favorite song on the album. Some really gorgeous melodies here. Nice, laid back arrangement. I like it a lot.
Tell Me Why: Fairly mediocre and a bit too sappy. I do love that Al is on so many songs on this album.
Sail Away: This is a fun song. I like the subtle Sloop John B melodies. Blondie's voice aged really well. He sounds cool. Especially with Blondie's vocal, this would've been a great song for TWGMTR.
One Kind Of Love:  Pretty good one, probably the second best song on the album. Some beautiful things going on in the string and brass arrangement.
Saturday Night: I don't mind that this album has so many guest singers. But since this is a Brian Wilson album, it doesn't make sense that he gives someone else the lead vocal on almost an entire song. So again, this just sounds like Brian guesting on someone else's song. Having said that, I do like Nate Ruess's voice and this song is really catchy.
The Last Song: Mike's Beard wrote that this is "The bastard love child of Bruce Johnston and Dennis Wilson at their most sappy. This tries to be another Summer's Gone but fails to do so," and I think that's a pretty good description.

I agree with Andrew too. I think most of us, if we were put in a hotel room and made to answer the same poorly researched questions OVER AND OVER AGAIN for a whole day or more

But isn't that partially his own fault? Couldn't it be that because Brian very rarely gives any long and deep answers, people just keep asking him simple questions?

I mean, you could ask him something like "Hey Brian, people obviously have different accents and different ways of pronouncing certain words. It can differ from town to town and sometimes even from neighborhood to neighborhood. I read somewhere that vocal harmonies supposedly sound best when the singers have exactly the same accent. Do you think that growing up in the same neighborhood, and in case of you and your brothers even in the same house, could be one of the reasons why the original Beach Boys' vocal blend sounded so magical?".

But you just know that he'll say something like "I loved harmonizing with Carl and Dennis. We sounded great on In My Room." Next question...

I guess that's why people keep asking him things like "What's your favorite song?", "Would you like to write more songs with Mike in the future?", "Do you still have that sandbox?" or "What's your favorite kind of pizza?". At least you might get a straight answer to your question...

I agree that those two questions are not the exact opposite of each other, but still: in no way it makes sense to call one song your most difficult one to write, and than to pick out that very same song as the one that required the least effort out of all the hundreds of songs you ever wrote.

And of course, this was just an example.

I suppose there are three explanations:

1. Like you said, whenever he doesn't feel like doing an interview, he just rushes through it without really thinking about the questions and goes with the first thing that comes to mind. Even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

2. He just likes to f*ck with journalists by giving them answers that totally contradict the answers that he gave a couple of interviews ago.

3. He's in a very subtle way actually not as humble as he usually pretends to be. He'll say that a song is extraordinarily complex, a week and a half later he'll say that it hardly required him any effort to write. Just like he has a different favorite Beach Boys album pretty much every time someone asks him, which might just be his way of saying that he made more really good albums than just 'Pet Sounds' and 'Smile'.

Either way, I don't really mind. I think the contradicting interviews are funny and they keep Brian intriguing.