Love You Appreciation thread

[HeroesandVillains]

Okay so Love You is pretty much one of the best albums the boys ever released behind Smile and Pet Sounds obviously.
Since everyone in here can basically agree with me on this, How about we all talk about how much we LOVE love you!

Talk about anything!
(As long as it has something to do with the album!)

[Emdeeh]

As much as I love the Wilson brothers, I'm not a fan of LY.

[The LEGENDARY OSD]

As much as I love the Wilson brothers, I'm not a fan of LY.

Totally agree, but I do like TNWSY and Good Time for Brian's incredible vocal on that song.

[jiggy22]

As much as I love the Wilson brothers, I'm not a fan of LY.

Great start to the Love You Appreciation Thread 

Love You was definitely one of those albums that took awhile for me to really appreciate. The first time I listened to it, I only got through the first side before giving up. Revisiting it months later, that's when I was suddenly starting to really understand what the album really was all about. It's Brian presenting introspective and self-reflective lyrics behind quirky, odd musical arrangements. The first thing that really hit me hard was "The Night Was So Young". Brian's awesome falsetto line during "is somebody gonna tell me", alongside Carl's delivery of "why she has to hide", that's when I fell in love with Love You. Nowadays, whenever I listen to one of the songs off of Love You, I usually end up listening to the whole thing. Outside of context, if one of the songs pops up in shuffle in-between some of the groups' earlier material, I can totally understand why some people are put off by it. Listening to all the songs as a cohesive whole usually presents the material in much better light. But yeah, definitely my third favorite BB album, behind SMiLE and Pet Sounds.

[halblaineisgood]

this album was made for us, and solely with us in mind!:Brian Loves Us.

[HeroesandVillains]

this album was made for us, and solely with us in mind!:Brian Loves Us.

I couldn't agree more.
Brian poured his heart and soul into Love You and it really shows. Through all the sadness and fear, Brian pulled through. Not for the Boys, the executives, Landy or everyone else in his way. He did it for us.
Because he loves us.
 

[JK]

I took me years to "get" Love You. Two things converted me in the end.

One was to treat it as "outsider music"----which it is, by any standards. Say Brian had only made this one album----he would have had a chapter to himself in Irwin Chusid's book on the subject instead of being mentioned en passant.

The other thing was the love for Love You on this board! Don't ask me how these things work but on this occasion it did.

So now I'm a major fan. :=)

[Needleinthehay]

"the night was so young" is just amazing...one of my fave BB's songs of all time...i like the juxtaposition of how ethereal the chorus is and then he contrasts that with something so mundane as going to drink some milk by his sink
Also, mona, I'll be he's nice and johnny carson all rank in my top BB songs....great album, imho.

[MikestheGreatest!!]

I hope the Love You album is reading and appreciating this thread and not getting its feelings hurt by any possible negative comments about any of its songs.

Rest easy, dear Love You, we still love you, you sweet loveable little oddball, you...(whoops!).

[thorgil]

I love Love You - all of it.

[Cool Cool Water]

I like the quirkiness of Love You.

[thorgil]

I like the quirkiness of Love You.

Yes that's exactly what I love in it. It's as quirky as "Smiley Smile", but in a wholly different way, as it's shown by the fact that some people love SS but hate LY, and vice versa. One of the most interesting qualities of Brian's music is that it can range from totally "square" to totally quirky - and what's more, quirky in several different ways.
If "Adult Child" had ever been released, it would have been quirky in yet another way. There is nothing in LY resembling "It's Over Now" and "Still I Dream of It".

[bossaroo]

a quirky classic if ever there was one.
it's a bit like the Today album, with upbeat tunes on side A and ballads on side B.

there's definitely a contingent of BW/BB fans who are put off or embarrassed by Brian's "quirkier" stuff, like I'd Love Just Once to See You, When a Man Needs a Woman, even Little Pad... while others of us find it to be Brian at his most childlike and charming, not to mention hilarious. I definitely fall in the latter group and Love You is most certainly the best example of that aspect of Brian... and the reason why so many of us either love Love You with a passion or dislike it with a vengeance. it's just so f*cking BRIAN.

[Senator Blutarsky]

I appreciate the quirkiness and there isn't really anything else like it in their catalog.  But admittedly it hasn't grown on me to a point where I listen to it often.

[Bicyclerider]

For me and I assume others the main problem with Love You is the lyrics - for a rock band in 1977 they are jaw droppingly juvenile, awkward, puerile, and . . . well just embarrassing most of the time.  Some find them naive and childlike and charming, but really . . .

But if you tune out the lyrics and listen to the music, it's progressive pop rock at its best - the bleeping bass synths are Brian moving into new, experimental territory as he hadn't done for years, the melodies are either catchy or absolutely gorgeous, the rough vocals and harmonies somehow fit the music perfectly.  Like Pet Sounds which really is unique in its sound, production and songwriting in the Beach Boys' catalogue, Love You is also unique, with no real precedents and no similar sounding follow ups.  I believe it is one of the gems of their catalogue, definitely top 5.

[Summertime Blooz]

I really appreciate Let Us Go On This Way. That one's cool. The Night Was Young is good too. The album just has a lot of really bad vocals, which should be their main selling point. The synthesizer sounds are primitive and behind the curve for the time. I do like the album mostly, but it's a mere reflection of former glory, not any return to form. It does sound good in comparison to everything that followed, I'll give you that, 'cuz it's a Brian album y'know?.

[Shady]

So much fun in one record.

Truly love this album.

[MyDrKnowsItKeepsMeCalm]

So much fun in one record.

Truly love this album.

+1   

[MarcellaHasDirtyFeet]

I was always on the fence about Love You-- I sort of enjoyed it, but usually chalked it up to my obsessive fandom, and assumed the outside world would be unable to enjoy the album (my friends' reactions confirmed this). The lyrics of Solar System and some of the vocals kept me from enjoying that song, for example, but it tingled me right in my schadenfreude receptors.

Then I heard the Love You demos a few weeks back.

The songwriting is transcendentally beautiful. The chords and the movement between them... Man. MAN. Wow. Totally new appreciation of an album I'd already lived with for 5 years.

It wasn't perfect, but I think this was the last gasp of the Genius of Brian Wilson. He's made some great music since, but Love You was just a shining jewel. Yeah, the lyrics aren't great on most of the songs -- even by Beach Boy standards -- and the singing is definitely weak in many spots (especially by BB standards). But oh well. I love Love You.

[marcella27]

I like Love You a lot.  The lyrics are so obviously written by Brian that that alone is endearing enough to earn the album a special place in the catalog.  As someone else pointed out on another thread, who else in the world but Brian could write the lyric "I know you're gonna love Phil Spector" and include it in what is otherwise a fairly standard pop song about love?

But more important than all that, if you strip away the crazy lyrics and the instrumentation, you're left with music that only Brian would write.  It's easy to dismiss songs like Solar System or Johnny Carson because of the lyrics, but if you listen to the key changes and the chords and the bridges in these songs, they're on a par with many of Brian's other great songs.  And that is what I love about the BB.  Of the hundreds of songs that they recorded, every one has something interesting in it, something redeeming.  To me, predictable music is boring music.  When you listen to Brian's songs (and arrangements) for the first time, they often go in a direction that your ear wasn't expecting, whether it's melodically or harmonically or rythmically, or the chord changes.  

[MarcellaHasDirtyFeet]

To clarify:

I have no problem with any bit of "Johnny Carson," so I guess my complaints about lyrics are probably to be ignored.

God, I love that song.

[MyDrKnowsItKeepsMeCalm]

But more important than all that, if you strip away the crazy lyrics and the instrumentation, you're left with music that only Brian would write.  It's easy to dismiss songs like Solar System or Johnny Carson because of the lyrics, but if you listen to the key changes and the chords and the bridges in these songs, they're on a par with many of Brian's other great songs.  And that is what I love about the BB.  Of the hundreds of songs that they recorded, every one has something interesting in it, something redeeming.  To me, predictable music is boring music.  When you listen to Brian's songs (and arrangements) for the first time, they often go in a direction that your ear wasn't expecting, whether it's melodically or harmonically or rythmically, or the chord changes.  

I think you've really hit on it. It's such a crazily unpredictable album. For me, discovering each song was like "where is this song going? It's going THERE? Is the singer even going to make it through the song? If the song sounds like this so far, what is the bridge going to sound like? Is there going to BE a bridge?"... etc etc. All that in two or three minutes. And even knowing all the songs inside and out by now, I still get some of that charge listening to them. Unpredictable, deeply heartfelt, and IMO quite damn funny too.

[urbanite]

There's some great tracks on this album and some that should have been left off.  I've read that this was one of those unfinished albums.

[barto]

I think Patti Smith said it best

[MyDrKnowsItKeepsMeCalm]

"Love You is siphoned from the meandering mind of a madman." Definitely a missed opportunity for a promo pull quote there.