Kindle Notes & Highlights
Music is a beautiful thing. Songs help me with my pain, and they also move through the world and help other people, which helps me, too.
The truth is that I will never really be comfortable up there, but I know how to tough it out and get through it. And whether I’m comfortable or not, it’s a place where I can be what I am.
You’ve already hit the home run. Now you just have to jog around the bases.” I went out and kicked ass that night, and the audience loved it.
“Oh,” I said. “Come on in.” We went to the music room. I asked him why he’d come to see me, and he said that he wanted to thank me for all the music I’d made. He said that the songs had helped him through some hard times. “You really want to see me?” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to see John Lennon or Harry Nilsson? I’m all washed up.” The guy laughed. He must have thought I was joking. But I wasn’t joking. I didn’t know where things were heading. I didn’t want to think about it. As far as I was concerned, the California Saga was the best thing on the record we had just finished.
In summer 1964 we put out All Summer Long. There is a real maturing of our sound on that record.
Houston and everything that came after it was a change, definitely, because after that I started to use the studio differently. I tried to take the things I had learned from Phil Spector and use more instruments whenever I could. I doubled up on basses and tripled up on keyboards. That made everything sound bigger and deeper. I was able to do more ballads and give them their own feel. The Beach Boys Today!, which came out in early 1965, was made both before and after Houston. It was the first time I could do songs like “Please Let Me Wonder” that had all this space in them. I was also smoking
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Any minute playing “Good Vibrations” is a minute that I feel spiritually whole. I hope that any minute hearing it is the same.
Listening to what’s in your head, especially when you’re a person with anxiety, leads to negative emotions. But they’re also a form of imagination. If you can worry about problems when there aren’t problems around, then you can also think of stories or songs when there aren’t stories or songs around. You can make things go from not existing to existing.
I love the whole Pet Sounds record. I got a full vision out of it in the studio. After that, I said to myself that I had completed the greatest album I will ever produce. I knew it. I thought it was one of the greatest albums ever done. It was a spiritual record. When I was making it, I looked around at the musicians and the singers and I could see their halos. That feeling stayed on the finished album. I wanted to grow musically, to expand our horizons and do something that people would love, and I did it.
It felt like a big cloud moved over me after I junked SMiLE. Even when we moved past it, I wasn’t okay with things. The idea of the record kept weighing me down. I could feel it on me whenever I started to get too far into hope and possibility. I would write a really cool tune, start the recording process, call the guys in, then suddenly lose interest and walk away from whatever I was doing. I started making up excuses like I didn’t feel good or I had a sore throat, anything I could come up with to avoid confronting my own work. I was afraid of failing,
It might feel like people don’t remember all the ideas you had or that you were first, but it takes the pressure off. Making SMiLE again was like rebuilding a sand castle or raising the Titanic. Everyone remembers how it used to look. But everyone also understands that it’s never going to be exactly the same as it was before. It can’t be. That’s not how time works. But it meant something new to people.
People say SMiLE is one of the greatest albums ever made. I’m not sure about that. I am proud of it, but I also think it’s a little overstated, overdone. I think it’s too much music—not too complicated but too rhapsodic, with too many different sections. Still, finishing it was a huge relief. It was a weight lifted.
I was sad, but I wasn’t so down that I couldn’t get back up. I was sad and able to use the things I was feeling to put emotions into my music. That was the way it was supposed to work.
But I did hear his music, and that taught me one thing early on, which was that music is perfect. It’s sound taken to a higher level.
I struggled through so many things and slowly, over time, found things that helped me. I found love. I found a support network. I found the right doctors and the right medications. But in my struggle, I had to pass through the wrong things.
I kept going, and I keep going. I have an idea for another album. It’s an album about time and music. It would be all the songs that inspired me through the years, rearranged and sung the way they sound to me. It’s in the early stages still, but I have started to pick out the artists. I want to do Buddy Holly. I want to do “A Beautiful Morning” by the Rascals. I’m definitely going to do “Be My Baby,” with all instruments doubled: two pianos, two guitars, two basses, plus horns and drums. Oh, and “Tenderly” by Rosemary Clooney. I can’t leave that off. That’s the song that taught me to sing.
Music has always been the light in dark times. It’s my number one thing, and Pet Sounds is the number one record. The last word of the album is no but the album is a big yes. And that’s what I want to keep working toward, whether it’s with old music or new music, old collaborators or new ones. That’s what I want to work toward with love and with mercy: the big yes.
