Entertainment, Music - Navy Times

‘Lucky Old Sun’ shines for Brian Wilson

You try living with the label “genius” over your head all the time.

For Brian Wilson, the much-celebrated musical savant who once led the Beach Boys to pop triumph before spiraling into a decades-long nervous breakdown, the expectations can feel overwhelming.

“It makes me feel very proud, of course,” Wilson says. But “you have to live up to your name. I feel pressured to do good stuff.”

Releasing new music can be scary, Wilson says, but at 66, he’s making his latest grab at pop glory: “That Lucky Old Sun,” his fifth album of new solo material, is an unabashed celebration of Southern California life, its warm songs citing familiar L.A. locales. It’s interspersed with narrative bits in which Wilson speaks as the sun.

The album, out Sept. 2, finds Wilson traversing familiar terrain: the rich multipart harmonies on “Morning Beat,” the sunny sentimentalism of “Forever She’ll Be My Surfer Girl,” the poignant melodies of “Midnight’s Another Day.” But if it echoes the early-1960s Beach Boys sound that brought Wilson his first brush with fame and acclaim, it wasn’t by design.

“I didn’t really liken it to the Beach Boys thing, you know?” he says. “A couple of things have a Beach Boys vibe ... But basically I just wanted to create new music that was a little more commercial than the ‘Smile’ album. That’s what I really wanted.”

“Smile” was the long-lost Beach Boys classic, recorded in pieces during 1966 and 1967 before the reclusive mastermind quietly slipped out of the band’s world, descending into drugs and battling psychological disorders. With lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Wilson completed the album in 2004, releasing it to widespread praise and a top 20 Billboard debut.

It was the latest high mark in Wilson’s ongoing resurgence, which began a decade ago as the newly healthy star staged his first tour in three decades.

“Smile” served to further energize him. Relaxing to trust his instincts, Wilson found his brain suddenly whirling with music, with songs pouring out every couple of days, and “That Lucky Old Sun” was unwittingly born.

“I had a creative explosion a couple of summers ago, and I recorded 18 songs,” he says. “After I completed the songs, I conceived the idea of ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ as a theme song for the album. So I went to the record store and bought Louis Armstrong’s version, changed the chords around, talked to my band, and we had it. ... I don’t have a creative explosion like that every year.”

Beyond the title song — an Armstrong classic Wilson has loved since he was a teenager — all the music was written by Wilson, with lyrics penned by Parks and bandleader Scott Bennett. Diehard Wilson fans are already familiar with the material: The songs were premiered at concerts in London and Australia in the past year.

Wilson says he didn’t instruct his co-writers, leaving it to them to capture the quintessentially California themes that make up the record.

“We wanted to try to make some poetic images of L.A.,” he says. “It’s about living in California and Los Angeles — the restaurants, the beach, the girls, the recording studios, everything.”

“That Lucky Old Sun” is more than a hometown travelogue. At times it’s a stirringly personal record: “At 25 I turned out the light,” he sings in “Going Home,” in words written by Bennett for Wilson’s voice. “’Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my tired eyes/But now I’m back, drawing shades of kind blue skies.”

Along with “California Role” and “Oxygen to the Brain,” it’s Wilson’s favorite song on the record — part of a closing stretch that’s capped with “Southern California,” in which he envisions reuniting with his brothers in the Beach Boys.

“He knows how to interpret me very well,” Wilson says of Bennett. “He wrote words that were introspective to my life.”

Wilson, whose lifelong infatuation with vocal harmony remains intact, is proudest of the album’s layered voice arrangements.

“I tried to put a lot of love in our voices, to sing sweetly,” he says of directing his band through the parts. “I love sweet voices — I always have.”

When he’s not in the studio, Wilson spends his days in a Los Angeles park and playing piano — “not to write, but to play because it makes me feel good.” He’s also warming up for a tour that’s set to begin Sept. 5 in Oakland, Calif., winding through the Western U.S. before heading east in November. He and his band will play the album in its entirety.

Wilson knows critics and fans will search for deeper meanings in the music, to sketch out the broader themes and parse the imagery tucked into the songs. But he’s content to keep the message simple.

“We’re trying to say we’re still making good music,” Wilson says. “Keeping good music alive with this album — that’s what we’re trying to do.”