The mixes for the Paley stuff are all over the place, even on latter-day official releases that include smatterings of tracks from those sessions. Some of the tracks included on that “Long Promised Road” documentary soundtrack sounded kind of wonky, kind of messy and cluttered and too much reverb. I sometimes wonder if they definitely have all extant multitracks of every single track from those sessions, because sometimes what we get sound like rough mixes.
I get the vibe Paley was going for; he wanted a mid-60s vibe with some reverb/echo, so I don’t expect the tracks to be bone dry. But stuff like “It’s Not Easy Being Me” sounds better on the boots.
The mixes pushed onto Brian’s website a few years back are better, because I think they just dumped existing mixes on there. That’s the only place to get a pristine “You’re Still a Mystery” with Brian’s original 1995 lead vocal.
I don't feel like we've ever known the correct
speed of those recordings. I know that early boots were alternately slowed down or speeded up, but a lot of officially released Paley tracks just play too fast. "Some Sweet Day" on Playback sounds super weird, and it's one of my absolute favorites. I think it's plausible that record company folks only had access to safety copies or dubs of the real sessions, and no one but Andy knows how they should have sounded ...
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