Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring is a song that The Beach Boys always sang in four part harmony, as it was originally performed by The Four Freshmen. Dennis didn't have the ability to learn it in 1961, and there was really no reason for him to ever sing it after that. Dennis is not on A Young Man is Gone.

It's entirely plausible that Carl, Bruce & co. attended the tracking session, despite the fact that Carl didn't play. We know that Danny Hutton was there, and that The Beach Boys were all in town.

Tony Martin, Jr.

https://thebeachboys.com/sail-on-sailor-sessionography/

Just heard this great upload on Youtube of Carl demoing City Jim (The Trader)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkQALrwURyA

Crazy how stuff like this wasn't included on the set

Great piano work! Who is that playing?

Carl Wilson

https://thebeachboys.com/sail-on-sailor-sessionography/

It can be heard on Unsurpassed Masters, very quietly - Brian sings the word "my" on an F#4 and then plays the same C# arpeggio that kicks off that vocal arrangement.

It's also worth mentioning (or re-mentioning? I can't keep track of what's been said) that the organ waltz "intro" from months later is not actually an intro, and was never labelled that way - that's something that was lost in translation when the GV box set was made, and the label stuck for TSS too. Brian starts to play "my children were raised..." after that piece on the tape, for what it's worth.

The March organ waltz then Intro to Heroes was marked on the tape box as Intro to Part 2, wasn’t it, and logged as a Heroes session?  Since Brian had been working on a side B for a 2 sided Heroes single in February after the cantina mix was finished, the presumption is this was to be an intro to the second side of the single.  Musically it’s identical to the Chimes Part 3, although as pointed out that Part 3 would have followed the A side’s Part 2 which was first Great Shape, then Bicycle Rider, and finally cantina.

The tape box, which mostly consists of the verse remake session, says "Intro to Heroes and Villains", and the organ waltz section was recorded hastily at the end of the date. I haven't seen a scan of the box itself, but I'd imagine that the notation is in reference to the section that took the majority of the session to record, and which is actually the first part of the song in all other mixes. I can't see the waltz section being an intro, with Brian playing CWR at the end of the take. Though, maybe a clearer look at what exactly is written on the box could help solve that one! Anything is possible.

Yes, there's nothing on the tape box that directly says Iron Horse was part of Heroes - but its placement with a collection of Heroes sections in mono, on the same reel, together with Vosse's comment that it was to share a song with Bicycle Rider, pretty strongly implies that it was a part of Heroes. The remade Great Shape section that both these pieces were replacing incorporates the moving cello line from Iron Horse anyway, and according to other vague comments from Vosse, it seems Brian was planning on using a Cabin Essence with no chorus for quite some time - meaning Iron Horse was up for grabs. The "part 3" section is musically similar - waltz time, chaotic arrangement, same chords, similar length. And "part 3" meant "after bicycle rider" at this time.

It's also worth mentioning (or re-mentioning? I can't keep track of what's been said) that the organ waltz "intro" from months later is not actually an intro, and was never labelled that way - that's something that was lost in translation when the GV box set was made, and the label stuck for TSS too. Brian starts to play "my children were raised..." after that piece on the tape, for what it's worth.

There were three different attempts at a Brian/Mike duet lead, all from January 1967. The first lead vocal for the verses was done by Brian alone on December 27, 1966.

The verse and barnyard sections of Heroes were recorded on October 20, while Great Shape was recorded on the 27th. Many variations on the Great Shape music were recorded that day, and the timing on the AFM contract matches the lengths of the three leadered takes added together. Only "I'm in Great Shape" was written on the tape box, not "Heroes and Villains".

On October 20th, Heroes didn't include Great Shape, and it appears that this was true by the 27th as well. The AFM contract does say Heroes and Villains though, and that was likely filled out at the end of the session, whereas Chuck Britz was notating the sheets on the tape box throughout the session. So Brian's "aha" moment could have come right after the recording for Great Shape wrapped up.

Brian's recording techniques and instructions (as well as the documentation) show that he had a full plan for Heroes every time he recorded a piece of it. That plan was always changing though, and when a section was recorded, it was usually only Brian that knew where it was going.

'Brian spliced Bicycle Rider onto the Heroes and Villains verse track on December 27 when he repurposed it for that song'

Super interesting but how do you know this..?

Well, the two tapes are literally spliced together. Bicycle Rider was cut from the complete assembly of Worms (literally cut, with a razor), and pasted after the verse of Heroes and Villains, which came on the same tape reel.

Just a heads up - Love to Say Da Da was recorded under that title first, then as All Day a month or so later, then as Love to Say Da Da again a few months later. Cool Cool Water is musically the same song, although lyrically very different, with more directly water-themed lyrics. Once Brian was working on a song called Cool Cool Water, he was no longer working on a song called Love to Say Da Da - it’s a rewrite. For those who are only familiar with the Smile Sessions disc 1 mix of LTSDD, the water chant at the beginning is a CCW recording from after the Smile era, and the sped up Carl vocal is flown in from a Wild Honey era CCW recording. The “merge” between the two recordings happened in 2011, and the idea to do so came from Mark Linett.

CCW itself is a merging of LTSDD (the music) and some ideas Brian did have for the actual water element (the water keyboard idea, that went unused both times).

So what is written on the tape boxes, while helpful in identifying what they thought they were recording at the time, does not tell you what it morphed into nor how Brian intended to overlay these pieces or if they may be used in more than one place.

Objectively, it does.

If Brian Wilson made an edit, then an edit was made by Brian Wilson. There are literal, physical thing he did to the music that are known. People are asking about these things, and I am answering.

Sometimes, these facts disagree with our own, personal "Smile". That is ok. But it does not change the facts, nor does it diminish their implications.

Someone asked me about objective truths surrounding Brian's plans for Love to Say Da Da, and I laid them out. You're not a fan of the facts and that's ok, but they cannot be publicly denied just because someone's interpretation is contradicted by the truths of the music. An interpretation, which, as I've made clear, is contradictory to what Marilyn Wilson, Carl Wilson, and Stephen Desper have all individually explained what the song is about, and which is founded upon misinformation itself (I am once again letting you know that Van Dyke Parks was not creatively involved with LTSDD).

If you want to make the argument that LTSDD works better on Smile as the water element, then by all means, make that argument and I won't stop ya! But if you want to make the argument that several people closely involved with the Smile album were all individually lying about Brian's plans for both LTSDD and the water element, and this is "proven" because some guy wrote an opinion piece about what the song means which you prefer, well, I hope you at least see how the logic isn't there.

The fan that I am referring to is the author of this article who came forward with this interpretation. The "lyric" in question was written by Brian Wilson, not Van Dyke Parks. Anyone's interpretation of this line is valid, and can be used to explain LTSDD as anything they want, as Smile is an interpretive piece of work that means something different to everybody. But nobody's personal interpretation proves that objective truths are untruths, or that Marilyn was hallucinating everything that she saw and heard when her husband wrote the song (although, I would probably think I was hallucinating if I were her! ).

Hope this makes sense.

Angela, a fan's interpretation of a song is just that - a fan's interpretation. That's fun, and I do love that kind of thing. I encourage it really, even when I have a different interpretation! We can all add letters to the syllables that Brian sings, in order to create some justification for the way we wish to view it. But this does not actually say anything about Brian's plans, and if a fan theory is contradicted by detailed reports about the song from people who were literally in the room with Brian while it was being written, well, that should be obvious.

[No.]

Now, there's another possibility here to consider...

What if Love to Say Da Da came from the Water element? What if Brian intended to record the exact same chord progression, maybe even with the June CCW vocal arrangement on top, and later turned it into LTSDD when the Elements went south? Well, that's a possibility to consider, and we can say that there's no evidence that it's true, but we can't necessarily disprove it.

However, I have a few reasons to doubt this. And yes, I know it's a theory I just invented that no one has even made. But I want to address this before anyone else brings it up.

Fire was, in part, a studio creation. Brian's friends at the session implied that he had just conceived the music immediately before, and much of the identifying "sound" of the record comes from the arrangement. Otherwise, it is a two chord vamp with a harmonized bass line, and that's all Brian really could have done, physically, on a piano. The water plans, as I've read Cam Mott's research on them over the years, seemed to be pretty vague. It sounds like Brian had a really cool idea for a concept, but that he had not yet written a piece of music that he would have put those water sounds to. Bringing back the "water keyboard" in the Desper era seems more like remembering an old concept rather than remembering the initial plan for what became another song. I'm not making any objective claim here, but it really does seem like "The Elements" was a more conceptual conception, rather than something Brian planned out one evening in full on a piano. That is probably a large part of why it fell apart so much faster, and in such a less complete form, than other Smile songs.

When Marilyn described Brian's bizarre ritual in writing LTSDD, it sounds like he was actually writing music on his Chickering grand - not repurposing pre-existing music to new vocal riffs. You can't even perform the vocal parts while you're sucking down chocolate milk, can you?

Moreover, throughout October 1966-July 1967, Brian was simply not a backwards thinker. Plans changed all of the time, but they always moved into something new. Old ideas that had already been abandoned were hardly ever revisited in their exact original form. Brian liked playing with the puzzle pieces floating around in his head, but making the same puzzle twice is boring. He never did it.

Also, Brian did say that he wrote Cool Cool Water in the new Bellagio house in March of 1967, as Liz pointed out earlier in the thread. Of course, he's off by a few months, but he remembers the song as a new creation in a new place, away from the Smile music of the past, although it's founded upon two essential pieces of Smile music. For what it's worth, when Bob Harris asked Brian in 1976 if anything on Sunflower was Smile material, he said no.

So, in short...

Is Love to Say Da Da (in either of its recording forms, under that title) the water element? No.

Did Love to Say Da Da come from ideas for the water element? Possible, but highly unlikely, given all of the above.

Did Love to Say Da Da later fuse with original ideas for the water element? Yes! This is Cool, Cool Water - not something that ever existed while Brian was working on an album called Smile, but it's a beautiful, cute little song that rose from the ashes.

Objectively, Love to Say Da Da was not considered to be the "water element" in Brian's 1966-67 recordings, but also, In Blue Hawaii is presented as the "water element" on BWPS (although it's not explicitly stated as such). At some point long before BWPS was constructed, this interpretation of LTSDD as water came to be among fans.

I have a sincere question about this. Do you think that the evidence you're looking at actually shows that Love to Say Da Da was *not* considered to be the "water element?" Or does it just show that *there is no evidence* that Love to Say Da Da was the water element? Because *eventually* that music became associated with water, so merely in the absence of evidence, we wouldn't necessarily know when that association started in Brian's mind. Does that make sense?

While I was thinking about this I had a fun thought. We know that across Brian's career he constantly reused ideas. It definitely seems like more often than not, if Brian landed on a chord progression or feel or idea he liked, he'd quite possibly find a home for it eventually, maybe years later. Which made me think about that famous quote about "air" being a piano piece he never recorded. Given how we know Brian worked, doesn't it seem more likely than not that if Brian composed something he liked enough to include in his conception of the Elements, that eventually he probably would have come back to those ideas in some way shape or form and used them somewhere? And if you accept that, than it's more likely than not that we *have* heard the Air music. We just don't *know* we've heard it. We have know way of knowing where it ended up! It could be hiding anywhere, on any album from 1967 to the Paley Sessions!

Just a thought that tickled me

Very good question, and thanks for asking! Certainly the latter, and I think the former statement is also something that we can say with near certainty.

In the case of Love to Say Da Da, here are some very specific details on exactly what evidence exists. The song was tracked in December, and engineered at Columbia by Jerry Hochman, which we know via the handwriting on the tape box. Jerry wrote the song down as "Da Da", which you might argue was the original title, but "Worms" is also written on the same box (as the verse section was placed on the same reel), and that's obviously shorthand. So possibly, LTSDD's full title existed from the beginning. Let me explain the context of these sessions a little bit more - on December 27 and 28, Brian was working on Heroes, and these were the first dates that the song was officially incorporated with what were previously the choruses of Do You Like Worms (bicycle rider) and Cabin Essence (iron horse), which were now bridges of Heroes. Brian was working on his own, so the work here was limited to lead vocals and mixing, which was achieved for the Heroes verse and bicycle rider, and just mixing for iron horse (all necessary vocals were in place). He also worked on Wonderful in some capacity, possibly recording a new lead vocal, creating a new mono mix, or both. Either way, that work is lost to time. Wonderful was possibly a B-side for Heroes at this point.

But he also did these Da Da tracks, and the song appeared to be in 3 sections - the DYLW verse (a section from a dead song, which was now an intro for a new piece - note the similarities in arrangement/feel and harmonic rhythm to the later LTSDD part 1), the Rhodes section, and the taped piano section. Recorded in the same modular fashion as many Smile songs by this point. As DYLW had effectively been killed off for the sake of Heroes, this appears to be an attempt to fill the hole that Brian had created in the project. This is why I agree with you that Smile was a salvageable project by the end of 1966 - Brian, at first, seemed to be a lot more careful in his destruction of other songs, by either letting them work without the section he used for Heroes (Cabin Essence was to be chorus-less by now) or writing a new song to incorporate the remaining pieces. Later, he would give no thought to this destruction, and it would rule out a great number of compositions from being included on the album.

On the composition itself - both Stephen Desper and Marilyn have commented about the song's subject matter being babies. Although Stephen did not directly engineer anything related to the song before it was CCW, he and Carl listened back to the tapes in attempts to revive the material a few times. Marilyn recalled that when Brian wrote this, he was sucking chocolate milk out of a baby bottle while playing the piano. You know, classic 1966 Brian Wilson stuff. This jives with everything about the song in both of its forms. The title is in reference to baby sounds, and the only vocals that were recorded for the May version are "a wah wah ho wah." It's a very Smile-ish little chant, but the syllables are definitely an intentional reference to baby sounds. I believe Desper called it something close to "baby sounds set to music." That is what the song was, and the fact that the edited sections of each version of the song (even the May production, which judging by the cancelled May 19 session, would have had at least one more piece) reach a length comparable to many of Brian's other Smile songs, seems to confirm that it was its own thing. The title being used consistently, with subtitles within that title (part 1, part 2, second day), essentially means that this was a song called Love to Say Da Da. Moreover, when you hear the Fire music... how evocative is that? You can practically see the fire. With Da Da? None of the musical cues imply a single thing about water. It's a baby song.

And how about the Elements side of things? Well, we actually do know about some of Brian's plans for the water section, and I'm surprised I haven't brought this up already. Michael Vosse has explained on a few occasions that he was sent out to make recordings of water, which he did actually do. Vosse told researcher Cam Mott that Brian planned to sample these sounds and use them as "notes" in some form, somehow. This was most likely in November, before the Fire section was recorded, and all the Elements plans went topsy turvy. But there were concrete plans for water; according to Brian, there was a written piece for air, and as we know, Fire was recorded. Earth was probably not far behind. But, beyond fire, nothing actually happened in the studio for The Elements. Things moved forward.

And to address the Cool, Cool Water connection - yes, it's nearly undeniable that Brian revived some old Elements ideas for this! In fact, Stephen Desper was told to do the same thing as Michael Vosse regarding water sounds, now for the purpose of CCW rather than The Elements. And he actually went above and beyond and physically created a keyboard of water sounds, which Brian wanted to use... and then just didn't. Brian, have some respect for the hard working engineers of the world! But yes, there are traces of The Elements in Cool, Cool Water, and of course, the music is based on Love to Say Da Da.

However, the transitive property doesn't apply here, and this is true of a lot of these connections that Brian has made in his music over the years. He reuses ideas, but he also combines a multitude of old, once unrelated ideas, into something new. This is something that the "LTSDD is water" originators failed to consider, but we can see it now in not just CCW, but a lot of tunes that came out of Smile material. Wind Chimes on Smiley Smile contains the melody and lyrics of... well, Wind Chimes, but the fade is the same music as Holidays! Does that mean Holidays and Wind Chimes were initially related? Nope, totally separate recordings, both their own songs, with ideas later combined in a new way. Same goes for dozens of variations of Heroes and Villains, and that's kind of where this really started to happen often - songs that were initially separate tracks being combined as one. It's a way to revive several incomplete ideas in a fresh way, without the need to use up more original music, and it's sort of beautiful, although destructive at times. This goes farther back than Smile, too. It's part of the essence of Brian's writing style, and it's a tool that never seemed to leave his "bag of tricks". He could be combining two unfinished songs as I type this.

Hope that helps!

Well said, BJL... it all matters!

There have been many angles to this conversation, and I think the lines have been blurred a bit. Objectively, Love to Say Da Da was not considered to be the "water element" in Brian's 1966-67 recordings, but also, In Blue Hawaii is presented as the "water element" on BWPS (although it's not explicitly stated as such). At some point long before BWPS was constructed, this interpretation of LTSDD as water came to be among fans. Now, it may have arisen out of misinterpretations of Brian's original plan... but that doesn't matter to some. The confusion, the misconceptions, the bootlegs, the fan mixes... they all started the Smile craze, and all the legend and the myth was incorporated into BWPS. Not to mention that the guy who assembled BWPS was a massive fan whose introduction to Smile was the bootlegs!

Now, I might not personally care all that much about BWPS, and the Beach Boys' 1960s recordings may really be all that truly matter to me, but different elements (pun intended) of Smile appeal to different people. So while track lists of bootlegs from the 80s and 90s don't reveal anything about Brian's initial vision (and we would be wrong in making such an argument) they do reveal something about the way that Smile has grown over the decades in the collective mind of the fans. THAT is what some people here are really interested in, and I think that we are debating about different Smiles at some point in this thread - no, LTSDD was not part of The Elements in 1967, but in 1998? Maybe! That's an interesting discussion itself! That is the stuff that's open to interpretation, which we can actually use the changing, evolving notion of Smile to understand.

Angela, I know that this mysterious piece of paper you have seen may “look official”, but I am telling you again that it is not. I am aware of exactly what was written down when throughout the entire Smile period, and I have access to some documentation that isn’t out in the open. I am informing you that what you’ve seen is not something from the 60s, nor does it reveal anything about Brian’s plans in the 60s.

There are lots of bootleg labels that have released various versions of Smile, there are endless fan mixes, and there have been attempts to release Smile for decades before the 2011 box set came out. You are looking at a track list for one of these. If I see it, I could probably narrow down just when and who it came from, but this is not a hoax, and it’s not elaborate. It’s just a list of songs someone wrote down that you’ve seen with no context. Unless, or course, it was presented to you as something that Brian planned - in that case, I’m afraid you have indeed been duped.

Wait…I thought Air was never recorded? At least that’s according to Brian himself… “it was a little piano piece that never got recorded “

Vegetables was separate from Earth, at least according to Brian’s memo.

DaDa may be water for BWPS but it wasn’t on the 66-67 sessions. That’s the thing… if we’re talking about it being released in 67 , we can only include what was already there on 67 and not include anything afterwards. Plans change but we can’t retroactively apply things that hadn’t happened at the time

Edit

I hope it doesn’t look like I’m picking sides …I’m 100% neutral on this!

Look at the track list Ang sent you. Obviously we don't know if it was bona fide but it preceded BWPS.  My point was as it ended up being Da Da perhaps Da Da became water earlier.  I also found an article from Keith Altman dated January 67 when he interviewed Brian and Brian told him they had 12 tracks ready.

Liz, are you at all interested in the validity of this track list you keep referencing? It is not of the era, because such a thing does not exist. You are looking at either a fan's reconstruction, something from a bootleg label, or something that was proposed as a retrospective release. I don't know which, because I don't exactly know what you're referencing, but whatever it is, it says nothing about Brian Wilson's plans circa 1966-7. I've explained that the "Da Da is water" misconception goes back much further than BWPS, and comes from the fact that it shares the same music as Cool, Cool Water.

Wind Chimes didn't get much bigger or smaller, besides the bombastic bridge section in the Smile version, which itself was a result of an earlier, larger production from August.

I agree with this. But I think the quote I pulled is where you maybe lost guitarfool, and me too a little. Because, sure, technically Wind Chimes might have been recorded using the same number of musicians, it might be musically at a similar level of complexity. And yet, my ears tell me that the Smiley Smile version is smaller. Or maybe, a better way to put it would be more "low key." It's low key in the way Carl is singing, it's low key in the way its mixed, it's just... Like, you're right, it didn't get smaller, not technically, not factually. But somehow, that fact, the fact that it didn't get bigger or smaller, doesn't tell the whole story. Because even though it didn't get smaller, it still *feels* smaller. It just does. You know what I mean?

And that's also where I think, at least in a certain light, or a certain iteration, the story Joshilyn and you are telling about Smiley Smile doesn't always feel quite right to some of us. And again, I don't think there's a real, significant difference here. Just a shift in emphasis, maybe. But I think there is an extent to which fans of Smiley Smile (like me!) want to position it as "just Brian's next obsession". And like, yes, that's  true. But also it represented a huge decline in ambition as a commercial record producer, and I'm not willing to concede that point... that in addition to a new set of obsessions, Brian also brought to this moment a shocking lack of ambition compared to what had come before.

I absolutely agree, and I also think, again, that neither point contradicts the other. Brian was getting into a new groove and a new sound he liked, and it was a complete drop in his attempt to be commercial and competitive. I don't think these things happened despite each other, but that not worrying about beating Phil Spector and The Beatles all at once allowed Brian to follow his muse while also not feeling the pressure he did just a few months earlier. It's Brian giving up his attempt to make the best album of 1967 that would hit the top of the charts, and it's also Brian making music that he liked to make.

Wind Chimes didn't get much bigger or smaller, besides the bombastic bridge section in the Smile version, which itself was a result of an earlier, larger production from August.

I agree with this. But I think the quote I pulled is where you maybe lost guitarfool, and me too a little. Because, sure, technically Wind Chimes might have been recorded using the same number of musicians, it might be musically at a similar level of complexity. And yet, my ears tell me that the Smiley Smile version is smaller. Or maybe, a better way to put it would be more "low key." It's low key in the way Carl is singing, it's low key in the way its mixed, it's just... Like, you're right, it didn't get smaller, not technically, not factually. But somehow, that fact, the fact that it didn't get bigger or smaller, doesn't tell the whole story. Because even though it didn't get smaller, it still *feels* smaller. It just does. You know what I mean?

I do know what you mean. It's nothing to do with the number of players, or how many overdubs were done, or how many tape generations were used... but that bizarre, intimate feeling is directly in your face here. How so?

I think what we're talking about here is in the arrangement. Instead of a pristine Carl Wilson vocal, which is double-tracked and tripled slightly off-mic by Brian in a soft whisper, and sounds more like what we would call a "produced recording" (its timbre is more in line with Good Vibrations than with Smiley's WC), we get 5 Beach Boys delivering a group performance, which, while carefully arranged note-by-note, feels almost improvised. It's like they themselves are being hypnotized by the wind chimes while they're singing. You can almost picture them all staring upwards, completely stoned, going "...wiiiind chimmmmesss??" in that astounded, questioning tone. The doubling only appears on a few select lines to give them emphasis, and Brian's "close your eyes and lean back" is sung so differently than Carl's vocal that it hardly even matters that one is a dry single-tracked performance. The unorthodox delivery adds to the bizarre vibe, and gets the sound away from the "clean" Smile recording.

I see the big melodica echo jump scare as sort of a revival of the loud bridge section... it serves the same humorous purpose of interrupting this peaceful song with something loud and startling, but in an easier way. "What if, instead of using a piece of an older production with loud horns and vocals, I just hold down as many notes on the melodica as possible, blow as hard as I can, and crank the echo?"

The tag, instead of being a bed of pianos that slowly increase in number, is an extremely quiet a cappella piece. I mean really quiet - you can barely hear the thing! It's not a less complicated production, but physically, the actual sound is smaller. There is literally less sound.

Well, that original post was a refute of the idea that Smile was completely maximalist, and Smiley completely minimalist, and that the two were worlds apart. But some songs, like Vegetables, went from one instrument to two. Wind Chimes didn't get much bigger or smaller, besides the bombastic bridge section in the Smile version, which itself was a result of an earlier, larger production from August.

But of course, other Smile tracks, such as Cabin Essence, My Only Sunshine, Fire, Look, and more were swapped out in favor of songs that are more low key. These two notions aren't contradictory - Smiley Smile is generally smaller than Smile, but there are traces of each in the other, and the change was more gradual than many suggest.

The May 19th cancelled Da Da session was one of about a dozen cancelled sessions in the past few months, no different than the rest. It wasn't even the first cancelled session of the week! It just so happened to be the last time he called a recording date off at the last minute, as there were only a few weeks left of recording in LA studios with session musicians before the big home studio move.

100%, 50%, 0%.

For simplicity's sake, let's say that these are the portions of material recorded for the projects Pet Sounds, Smile, and Smiley Smile, that can be called "big productions", however we want to classify that. It seems that we all have some sort of agreeance on what that means, and these numbers are actually pretty close.

This series of values is something that we call "strictly decreasing". This is not something that can be argued. Our interpretation of it, of course, is subjective. But take any selection of, say, 3 months from 1966-1967, and you will find a lower proportion of these "big productions" compared to what came before. Even within the Smile period, the shift from the Looks and the Cabin Essences into the Vega-Tables and the Cantinas is very, very apparent. This is objective. You can make the claim that, although Brian's production style slowly changed from one thing to another, it was all coincidental, and Brian never looked past each individual section as a production. That is a claim that can be made, and I disagree with it, but it is something that can be argued.

What cannot be argued is that Brian's productions slowly approached minimalism throughout this period. That is a fact, not an opinion.