Brian was obviously that way to an extent. A total shame. Not sure what you mean by "That comes from somewhere, and it wasn't just Murry."

The examples you gave afterwards are exactly what I mean. I think tiny little put downs or casual remarks, or, yes, goofing off during tracking sessions, or making fun of the Mickey Mouse voice, all that stuff which frankly is what you expect when you put a bunch of relatives in the room together for years on end; it does sometimes build to a head, and when you're Brian Wilson, who might not interpret everything the same way most people do, he was probably more hurt by it than you'd think. When Brian would do something creative, I think it was like his baby, it was really important to him as an expression of himself. Now, if you bring your newborn around to show the family and someone jokingly says "Oh, man! Look how fat his cheeks are!" they probably don't mean anything by it. But the parent would probably bristle and get really defensive of it. At that point they either choose to get angry and fight back (as Brian did with Murry), or they decide, you know what, I'm not going to let these guys babysit. I think somewhere along the line, Brian stopped reacting to those things with the former choice and switched to the latter, so that eventually he just wasn't bringing them songs at all.

I mean, from his perspective, it was a little much. "Brian, we got a new album, we need some songs. Get off your ass and write something." "Well, I've got these big band songs." "What the hell? We're not that kind of group. Write something else." "OK, I've got this song that's basically a suicide note where I compare myself to a cork." "What a downer! We're not that kind of group. Write something else." "Well, I've got this fairy tale about a radio." "What the hell?! Brian! Will you just write something normal for once!"

Again, not an accurate depiction of how those things went, but I suspect that to some degree or another that's how those conversations were perceived by Brian. It's just a hunch I have.

Christian sounds very very like Carl. Jeff really doesn't sound like a Beach Boy at all. I don't object to him being there, because he's one of the few links between Brian's band and the Beach Boys. And he can hit the notes. But he doesn't sound like them, IMO

i still can't believe that part of the album was recorded at ben folds' studio. so weird.

I think it's kind of fitting. Ben's style of songwriting doesn't really seem to be terribly influenced by the Beach Boys, but his harmonies definitely do. Something like the acapella tag at the end of "Rock Star" is vintage BBs.

I can actually see your ponit Keysaroze001.  I see Brian and Mike as two diffrerent personalities, I can definately see Brian taking Mike's objections or even casual comments as 'seeds' of doubt. 

The only possible difference of opinion here may be though, that in my opinion, that's an issue with Brian, not Mike.  Mike is Mike, and if Mike wasn't there, somebody else would plant the seed in Brian's head. 

I also think that's something that happened in the 60's, I don't think Brian's like that anymore. 

Oh, it's totally a fault of Brian's. Yes, if it hadn't been Mike, it would've been someone else. I think Mike just was the most likely one to even jokingly say something that might plant that seed, and as soon as Brian latches on to something like that, an "oops, lost my head" wouldn't be enough to take back the joke, you know? Brian's just too damn sensitive. It's one of his biggest flaws, but of course with out that, he wouldn't be inclined to write so many non-tough-guy songs.

As for the post-Mike-as-Villain world, I haven't moved there yet. Sorry.

If anything, and maybe this is going out on a limb, in some cases he might be better now. He doesn't have the range or maybe the dexterity that he used to. But I feel like when listening to the 2004 SMiLE, for instance, that there's so much going on behind the lyrics because of the life he's led since 1966, that the vocals are just, I don't know, informed by those experiences. It's not as sweet a sound, of course, and really the falsetto hasn't been the same since the 80s, even when he did still have most of the range. He sounded more like Frankie Valli in the 80s. Even in the late 70s, "She's Got Rhythm" sounds so harsh up there, like if you took "guts" from the last chorus of "Catch a Wave" and then looped it for an entire song. But what he does now just has more grit to it, when he does it right. Makes him a bit more of a badass. It's the voice of a survivor, somehow.

Oh, and on another note, one of the things that makes him still sound like Brian is that he's never stopped scooping up to his notes. When he was young, he would never ever land directly on a note. He'd start maybe half a step down and would slide up to the note he was looking for. It somehow made the high notes seem even higher, like he needed to reeeeeeeach for them. It's a technically wrong way of singing, but it's so so effective for him. You listen to Vince Gill sing "domino" and it's just not quite as effective, because he seems to just pluck the note out of nowhere with ease. Brian always sounded like he was striving to get those notes, which made them more interesting. He still does that. The 2004 "Surf's Up" on "adieu or die", each time he goes up a step, he scoops up to it. It's a true trademark of his singing for me, and it's one of the reasons that Jeff never quite sounds like him when doing the high parts. He lands on the notes rather than scooping up to them.

Picture "You Still Believe in Me" with lyrics about cars.

The notion of Mike taking over Smile or Pet Sounds with lyrics about cars or surfing is absurd by that point in time. One need only listen to "Good Vibrations", Smiley Smile, Wild Honey etc. etc. etc. (not to mention most lyrics on Today! and Summer Days) to realize even Mike was kind of over that stuff as a lyricist until the mid 70s when even Brian was on board with the oldies thing (sans "Do It Again", but the whole song aims for that).

Yer point still stands, though. I don't know if it really would have went down like that, as not everyone in the group said they were unsure of the newer material. Don't forget that aside from vocals, the guys do appear on several Smile tracks - Dennis playing drums on "Holidays" or organ on "Good Vibrations", for instance. There's also the fact that Brian had them doing stuff like recording in his swimming pool, recording themselves eating vegetables, laying on the ground making animal noises etc. etc. etc. around the same time. Brian was questioned by Mike and maybe others within the band, but they ultimately trusted him and went along with what he was doing regardless of what he asked. I don't think them playing the basic tracks instead of the Wrecking Crew would have changed that.

No, of course. I was being glib because I'm one of those fans with a chip on his shoulder over Mike in general. He obviously wrote about plenty of other things on albums in that era, and even more so in the several which followed. I'm just saying, if there was grumbling over the second side of Today being a downer, and let's face it, most of PS is a downer, wouldn't the same thing have happened?

The trouble with someone like Brian to me is (and this is PURELY speculative), I can imagine him being the sort of person where all you need to do is plant the seed of doubt for it to grow and grow in his head to the point where he doesn't believe in the idea himself anymore. Something (grossly oversimplified, I admit) like this:

BW: OK, guys, so I want you to crawl around and make barnyard noises.
ML: What the hell?
BW: Yeah, it'll be more realistic if you're down there doing it, cause that's where the goats and pigs would be.
ML: Can't you just use something from Capitol's sound effects library for this?
CW: I'm sure Brian knows what he's doing.
BW (to himself): Wait...DO I know what I'm doing? No one's done this before. What if it's a terrible idea? What if I lose whatever credibility I have left? No one liked how I used all those tacet moments in "The Little Girl I Once Knew". No one bought Pet Sounds. I should just give up. (to the boys) Forget it, guys. It's a stupid idea. We'll do something else instead.
ML: No, no, Cousin Brian, we were gonna do it. We're just giving you a hard time.
BW: No, it's a terrible idea. Let's forget it.

Again, that's a gross oversimplification of the dynamic in the studio. But it's what I imagine happening based on how easily he gave up on ideas dear to him in subsequent years. He had no fighting sprit in the studio anymore, because he was probably afraid of rejection. That comes from somewhere, and it wasn't just Murray.

I think it'd be more obvious if they were stretching his vocals to make the notes longer. I've used that technique from time to time when recording vocalists who needed a quick breath before finishing a phrase, and it's usually pretty obvious if you're listening for it and it's used over and over again on a vocal track. I think in the case of Gershwin, it meant enough to him that he was probably adamant on doing it right, and the vocals reflect that. The way the arrangements are done on that record and the placement of his voice, most of the time it's so prominent that it'd be very obvious indeed if a lot of electronic trickery were saving the day. Heck, half the time he didn't even double-track, as far as I can tell. The most that's on his vocals is maybe a little pitch correction where needed and some reverb, I think.

There are some sort-of factual errors here.

They WERE there for GV sessions, and Mike played the theremin part on stage with much fun.  And of course, they participated, minus Mike, in the tracking session for "That's Not Me" with no problems at all.  Carl and Dennis played on plenty of Smile tracks with apparently no complaints.

Lyrically, there is room for debate, but instrumentally, the boys including Mike never had any complaints.  Also, these guys were used to recording tracks without any idea of what the lyrics were.  Of course it wouldn't sound exactly the same, but the heavy presence of the Beach Boys as musicians on both Today and Summer Days suggests they could have gone on just fine in a similar vein.

Oh, I know they were present for at least some of that material. Some of the best tracks on Today! feature the boys heavily. I'm just thinking on some of the more...I don't know, unusual or maybe introspective moments on PS, I think they'd end up sounding differently because of the input or objections of the band, and it would just plain sound different, potentially not as engaging, or different songs would've been used altogether. I mean, surely Mike was ok with the theremin on stage because the song was the biggest hit in the world, but I doubt he would've agreed to play it on the sessions. I think with GV Brian had everyone (including the Wrecking Crew) so baffled as to what the holy hell they were recording, that it was hard to object to anything when you were only privy to 30 seconds of it at a time.

And I mean, Carl and Dennis were clearly the ones who were the most inclined to follow Brian's lead in that period, right? Certainly the direction Denny's music ended up going was influenced by Brian, and not the "Chug a Lug" Brian, but the "artistic" Brian. Carl generally was more inclined to cut his brother some slack in that regard too, or else there would've been no "Mt Vernon" 45, right?

Basically I guess I'm not talking about the entire band, so much. I'm saying Mike would've passive-aggressively bullied Brian into doubting stuff like "Don't Talk" or "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times". Why you have to write such a downer, Cousin Brian?

YES HELL YES Sheriff Stone on "Colors of the Wind".  Somebody should whisper in his good ear that he's never sounded better than that, if he would embrace that style and do some more songs like that I would be in Heaven.  No pun intended.  

His singing on the Disney album is a little all over the place to my ears. Generally very good, but "Just Can't Wait to Be King" he sounds almost out of breath, never quite finishing the last syllable of each line. Same on "Bare Necessities". But on other tracks like "Baby Mine" or "Stay Awake", he really sounds into it. On Gershwin you heard him doing something he doesn't do very often anymore: sustain notes consistently. All throughout Gershwin you hear honest-to-goodness vibrato at the ends of phrases, which means he's continuing to support his breathing even after he's hit all the notes required for the melody. You think of how long he holds "Porgyyyyyyy, do-won't let him take meeeeeee" without pausing for breath, then compare it to "workin' on my ruh" in "Just Can't Wait to Be King", it's just a different type of singing. I know, the style of the songs is different, but it feels like in the ballads on Disney he paid more attention to sustaining that way, and on basically the entirety of Gershwin as well.

this album is way too short.

TLOS, Gershwin, Disney, Imagination....are all between 35 and 39 minutes.

Every Beach Boys and BW solo album other than SMiLE and OCA has been shorter than 42 minutes, as far as I know. Brian still thinks in terms of LPs, which were only able to fit maybe 45 minutes at the absolute most in the 60s. Right down to how he sequences the albums, I've long held the opinion that he thinks in terms of a Side 1 and a Side 2. Consider how "California Role" has an actual ending instead of crossfading directly into the next track or narrative. Even SMiLE probably shouldn't have been as long as it was. I highly doubt Brian would have sequenced it to be a 3-sided album, and he probably wouldn't have done a double-LP. Hell, I'd say we count ourselves lucky it isn't the length of Wild Honey, which is less than 30 minutes!

GIOMH is 53 minutes.

Good God, you're right. I guess I've just never once listened to it beginning to end. Still, I think it just shows that he was slapping any old songs he had finished on there instead of carefully choosing, because it doesn't feel like any kind of a complete cohesive statement whatsoever.

What I Really Want for Christmas is technically longer as well, but the last three tracks are essentially bonus tracks not really recorded to be part of the album, so I don't think of them as being part of what he intended the album to be in terms of sequencing. Otherwise why not end the whole thing with Auld Lang Syne like on the BBs Christmas album?

So I haven't heard the whole thing yet, but I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "Summer's Gone". From what I've heard, definitely just sounds like an older version of the guy who sang "Caroline No" and "Please Let Me Wonder".

I think it's tone and intent of the vocals more than actual vocal similarities. Probably also because it evokes "Caroline, No" in terms of being so elegiac and its placement on the album.

And yeah, his delivery of the entire Porgy suite is just awesome. The kind of soul in his voice on those tracks that you're used to hearing from Carl.

I'm gonna double back to my earlier opinion that it's not a matter of whether or not PS could have been recorded by the BBs, at least the track bed. The question is whether or not they WOULD. I mean, Brian got grief because side 2 of Today! was too depressing. He got sh*t from Mike about the PS songs being too serious and down. I feel like because the boys knew they needed a product and Brian had all that work done, they just went ahead with the vocals, but if they'd be there to influence the song selection, tone of the lyrics, any of that stuff, I'm convinced the album wouldn't be the same. Firstly, Mike probably would've convinced Brian to let him rewrite the lyrics instead of using Tony's words, at least on some of the tracks. Picture "You Still Believe in Me" with lyrics about cars. The two instrumentals probably wouldn't have been recorded at all. I just don't see the guys going for it, because by and large they STILL think of it as the record with GOK, WIBN, and the Sloop single from the year before, with a whole bunch of pretentious woe-is-me stuff from Brian. Same was true with SMiLE. If they'd been there during the sessions for GV, there'd be no theremin. If they'd been there for SMiLE, it would've fallen apart even sooner than it did. I can't picture the boys putting up with wearing fire helmets and being told the percussion needs to sound more like jewelry. Or doing take after take explaining to Denny that he's supposed to be putting the friggin' fire out by hitting his toms. And I doubt Brian would've even tried to go through those exercises with the boys. The only reason he felt liberated to be so adventurous with those tracks was because he was surrounded by people who had suggestions, yes, but who didn't criticize or belittle the work he was doing. If we consider that at least part of the reason SMiLE was shelved was because of nit-picking and confusion from the rest of the band, or how stuff like "Til I Die" or basically all of Adult Child was likewise rejected by them, we know there's a proud history of discouraging his flights of fancy within the group. I don't know, maybe I'm totally off-base here (and I encourage those with far more knowledge about this than me to say as much), but I just don't see PS coming out to sound basically the same but just happening to have different musicians on the tracks.

Regarding the Paley session vocals: WHY do they sound so weird? It's almost as if he's trying to sound like someone else.

Are the tapes sped up or something?

(Depending on what copy you have) slow them down by 6 percent.

If using Landylocked, I used 7 percent and it came out sounding basically like he did on the Roxy album.

I very rarely find any instances where current Brian sounds like 60s Brian, but I think the way he growls his way through "It Ain't Necessarily So" he sounds very very much like 15BO Brian. Especially on the "Jonah he lived in a whale" verse.

I agree with the assessment that the reason his vocals on the last few albums have been so good is enthusiasm. His absolute best vocals of his solo career are on the Gershwin, because there's practically no music ever written which he loves more than Gershwin.

this album is way too short.

TLOS, Gershwin, Disney, Imagination....are all between 35 and 39 minutes.

Every Beach Boys and BW solo album other than SMiLE and OCA has been shorter than 42 minutes, as far as I know. Brian still thinks in terms of LPs, which were only able to fit maybe 45 minutes at the absolute most in the 60s. Right down to how he sequences the albums, I've long held the opinion that he thinks in terms of a Side 1 and a Side 2. Consider how "California Role" has an actual ending instead of crossfading directly into the next track or narrative. Even SMiLE probably shouldn't have been as long as it was. I highly doubt Brian would have sequenced it to be a 3-sided album, and he probably wouldn't have done a double-LP. Hell, I'd say we count ourselves lucky it isn't the length of Wild Honey, which is less than 30 minutes!

Yeah, when I was listening to "Summers Gone" driving home last night about 10p.m., I couldn't help but think about how sad it's going to be to not have the Beach Boys with us one day.  Sounds like Brian and Jon Bon Jovi were thinking about it too. 

At the end of "Pacific Coast Highway" I felt quite sad when they sang "good bye".

Overall, yeah, that middle of the record really sags. I might resequence on the old iPod going forward, but my oh my, those last three songs are stunners. So elegiac.

I'm with you in praising Mike as a lyricist. In some alternate version of the world I like to think there's a TLOS with Mike lyrics all over it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "What Love Can Do" the most recent BW track before the stuff on this album?

He's released three solo albums since then.

Oh, wow, the song's that old?! I thought it was maybe 18 months ago or something, recorded contemporaneously with Disney. My bad.

Don't know if this has been mentioned yet (I've tried reading through this entire thread as time has gone by, but my word, it's long). Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "What Love Can Do" the most recent BW track before the stuff on this album? If so, I'm not sure if it's coincidence that there was some kind of pitch correction slathered all over his vocals on that song as well. Now, on the one hand, that was produced by Phil Ramone, IIRC, who I haven't known to use modern tools like that in most of the music of his that I've heard over the years. But it's definitely there. So couldn't it be that Brian requested its use there and continued to do so on the new stuff because he liked the outcome there? To my ears, it sounds no better or worse than it does on the new album.

That's putting a little bit too fine a point on it, I think. Yes, the cult of Brian gives undue credit to his mediocre work and unfairly classifies Carl's songs as second-rate. But Brian did do a fair deal more than come up with some chords. That said, if the band existed with, say, Dennis as the chief songwriter, then who knows? Perhaps they'd have been popular as well and Dennis would've gotten more credit for being a really excellent songwriter. It's sort of the same thing with John Lennon. Because he was the "genius" of the group, many fans ignore the dreadful material he released and the fact that he was basically an impossible human being, and focus only on his classic material, as if it's the whole story.

As far as I can tell, most of Brian's piano playing is as a rhythm instrument, almost strictly chord-based. Other than the boogie-woogie based songs on the early records, where he did a little bit of soloing (which, even then, was mostly chord based), you listen to the piano/keyboard parts on BB albums and the parts all sound like the opening to "Message Man": dun-dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun. Sometimes he'd do arpeggios or maybe a riff or two, or if he was overdubbing a lot like on Love You it'd be more intricate because he did multiple passes to arrive at it. Sometimes his left hand would get a little fancy (the run-down during the coda of "Surf's Up", for instance) but he wasn't throwing all kinds of fancy Ben Folds-style business in there. He just isn't that type of player. He uses it to compose, and if he's proficient at anything on it, it's finding strange chord combinations, or unusual root notes to change the color of a chord (again, "Surf's Up" is loaded with that kind of thing). I suspect he plays this way because his frame of mind is always about harmony, hearing multiple notes at the same time to see how they compliment or contrast with each other.

As for David, I dearly hope that if there's another BB album after this, Brian takes full advantage of his abilities to enhance the songs. He could be a real asset to him in terms of coloring the arrangements. I picture Scott struggling with the Spanish guitar fills on the DVD of TLOS and think to myself that Dave could do that sort of thing.

I think really the perception comes from Pet Sounds and the build-up to SMiLE, where a lot of the press coverage emphasized that Brian was the mastermind with his dynamo team of musicians and the Boys were his backup singers, essentially. It probably doesn't help to one degree or another that the albums which followed immediately after SMiLE fell apart were pretty sparse in terms of production, relatively speaking. To my mind, the biggest mistake of Smiley Smile is that it included the elaborate "Heroes and Villains" and "Good Vibrations" alongside songs which sounded like the guys were just messing around in the sandbox and didn't realize they were being recorded. Then of course Wild Honey and Friends were also sort of homespun affairs by and large. Awesome albums, no question, but just plain more laid back and less ambitious than PS or "Good Vibrations". So if you go from complicated drum and percussion parts, for instance, on "I'm Waiting for the Day" or "Good Vibrations", and then get an album with a bunch of bongos and nothing else, it's hard for your first instinct not to be "Oh, well, that's cause they don't have Hal on this. Obviously Dennis can't play." I'm not saying that's accurate, cause it's not. The Boys were perfectly capable of playing their instruments, but they weren't amazing instrumentalists; they were amazing singers who also played instruments pretty well.

Personally, I feel that if SMiLE had been completed and THEN they released something like Friends, that would've served them well, because it would have felt more like a purposeful shift in direction. Basically the same kind of deliberate scaling-back found in the productions of Plastic Ono Band or McCartney after the symphony of Abbey Road. Or Paul Simon's self-titled coming after Bridge Over Troubled Water. Or Dylan's John Wesley Harding after Blonde on Blonde. Instead, because SMiLE was unfinished after all that anticipation, presumably the perception was that these guys didn't know what they were doing in the studio without having the cadre of session guys featured on Today! through Pet Sounds.

I think it hurt them terribly and has caused near irreparable damage to their reputation and legacy and it did great damage to all involved........ I can't tell you how many times I've heard friends laugh off the Beach Boys as basically N-Sync of their day who didn't even play on their own records. Some people can't ever get past that "fact" and just forget about The Beach Boys altogether.... Now, someone who CAN get past that idea and has the patience to overcome all the various Beach Boys related perception issues, they come to not care one bit (it also doesn't hurt that they know how much the BBs DID contribute instrumentally) .... I think things have turned for the better recently thanks (especially) to Stebbins and others, but it was a hard hurdle in the uber cred conscious 90's/David Leaf era and when Pet Sounds was the only cool BBs album.

Well, then it's a double-edged sword, cause without the session musicians who knows what Pet Sounds or "Good Vibrations" would've sounded like? And since those records are a huge part of their legacy, I have to wonder if they'd have been better or worse off in the long run if Brian had tried to record those songs with the band themselves. Frankly, I don't think they would have done it. I think that basically the SMiLE scenario would've happened a year earlier. And we'd have no Sgt. Pepper to boot, because Paul wouldn't have heard things like the bass harmonica all over PS to inspire him to expand the Beatles' palette.

To my mind, any tarnishing of their legacy lies entirely at the feet of each member of the band itself, not the session musicians. The SMiLE debacle, hodgepodge albums like 20/20, the whole Brian's Back era in the mid-70s, the bloody hula girls, the striped shirts or the hats or Mike in a damn turban or Mike half naked in the 80s, the endless rewrites of "California Girls" on each new album since the late 70s, Full House, SIP, the Manson thing, Denny's entire descent into addiction, the public's perception of Brian as basically some kind of extra-terrestrial, and dozens of others I just can't think of right now. They all contributed to the reputation of the band overall as being perhaps beneath critical engagement. But those are the things which ultimately make them so fascinating and worthy of discussion. They're so so flawed, but capable of achieving heights which have yet to be topped.

"Mike half naked in the 80s"

When did this happen?

Please tell OSD to post the footage!!!!

You know what I mean. Those shows when he wore like shorts and maybe a lei and nothing else. Oh, wait. He wore a trucker hat, of course.

I think it hurt them terribly and has caused near irreparable damage to their reputation and legacy and it did great damage to all involved........ I can't tell you how many times I've heard friends laugh off the Beach Boys as basically N-Sync of their day who didn't even play on their own records. Some people can't ever get past that "fact" and just forget about The Beach Boys altogether.... Now, someone who CAN get past that idea and has the patience to overcome all the various Beach Boys related perception issues, they come to not care one bit (it also doesn't hurt that they know how much the BBs DID contribute instrumentally) .... I think things have turned for the better recently thanks (especially) to Stebbins and others, but it was a hard hurdle in the uber cred conscious 90's/David Leaf era and when Pet Sounds was the only cool BBs album.

Well, then it's a double-edged sword, cause without the session musicians who knows what Pet Sounds or "Good Vibrations" would've sounded like? And since those records are a huge part of their legacy, I have to wonder if they'd have been better or worse off in the long run if Brian had tried to record those songs with the band themselves. Frankly, I don't think they would have done it. I think that basically the SMiLE scenario would've happened a year earlier. And we'd have no Sgt. Pepper to boot, because Paul wouldn't have heard things like the bass harmonica all over PS to inspire him to expand the Beatles' palette.

To my mind, any tarnishing of their legacy lies entirely at the feet of each member of the band itself, not the session musicians. The SMiLE debacle, hodgepodge albums like 20/20, the whole Brian's Back era in the mid-70s, the bloody hula girls, the striped shirts or the hats or Mike in a damn turban or Mike half naked in the 80s, the endless rewrites of "California Girls" on each new album since the late 70s, Full House, SIP, the Manson thing, Denny's entire descent into addiction, the public's perception of Brian as basically some kind of extra-terrestrial, and dozens of others I just can't think of right now. They all contributed to the reputation of the band overall as being perhaps beneath critical engagement. But those are the things which ultimately make them so fascinating and worthy of discussion. They're so so flawed, but capable of achieving heights which have yet to be topped.

I think typically it corresponds with what the main focus of the people in the band happens to be. To my mind, people like Jimmy Page were musicians first, songwriters second (or even third). Brian is a songwriter first, singer second, musician third, so for him that's the approach, as a songwriter, and everything is in service to the overall sound. George was definitely a musician first, but so much of his trade was learned while he was with the Beatles, who were songwriters first, musicians second, that he ended up approaching his playing as if it were another lead melodic instrument, like another voice. Or in some cases, it really was the primary voice, with his own singing coming second. Would that he had taken that approach with the Dark Horse album.

George was an excellent player, able to play rockabilly licks with the best of them back in the early days, and with a great sense of melody as the years went on. Like I said, he wasn't flashy. He didn't play to get attention, you know? He wasn't Yngwie Malmsteen or anything. But his playing had a delicacy which made you almost take for granted how technically splendid he was. He could certainly play a blistering solo, although he almost never did (the solo on the album version of "Let It Be" is a rare example), because he always played whatever suited the song overall. That's what The Beatles were really great at doing (much as Brian was able to do). Nothing in the arrangements ever called attention to itself; it served the song as a whole.